


dark horse

by aeriallon



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Tattoo Parlor, Harry Potter Epilogue What Epilogue | EWE, M/M, Magical Tattoos
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-06
Updated: 2020-03-06
Packaged: 2021-03-12 21:54:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 27,549
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23031505
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aeriallon/pseuds/aeriallon
Summary: Several expressions fought their way across Hermione's face, settling into a kind of thunderstruck resignation. “One of the most powerful wizards of our age, living with a flatmate in the East End and using his abilities to run a magical tattoo parlor.”“We also have a kitten,” Luna added.Nearly a decade after the Battle of Hogwarts, Neville lives a quiet life: steady work as a tattoo artist, a wonderful flatmate in Luna Lovegood, and a brown tabby named Demetria. Whereas Draco Malfoy is still an attractive trainwreck, but with a certain tattoo that he needs to have removed.
Relationships: Neville Longbottom/Draco Malfoy
Comments: 102
Kudos: 198





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [VLDarling](https://archiveofourown.org/users/VLDarling/gifts).

Neville stood there for a long time, outside the Black Lab, trying to summon enough nerve to go in. The weather had turned foggy around tea time, and not at all picturesquely, an unpleasant city damp that got down one’s clothes and made everything clammy and bleak. Accordingly, he had turned up his coat collar and was standing across the street from the pub in the notional protection afforded by a closed-up Boots chemist’s; they’d lowered their corrugated metal grating and it was cold against his back, where he leaned against it. His feet were wet, inside his shoes. His nose was running. This was stupid. Pubs were stupid. _Birthdays_ were stupid.

Neville hadn’t liked birthdays his entire life—not a single one, ever. Not his; not anyone else’s. His own was probably the worst, coming as it did a day after the Boy Who Lived. That wasn’t what Neville really minded, though, and besides, Gran had tried hard to make his birthdays festive, even when it was just the two of them. It was that—it was the utter absence of his parents, and the blurriness of his few remaining happy memories of them all together as a family, how distorted and warped by time and magic they’d become. The strange hollow feeling, too, when it was one of _their_ birthdays, and he’d catch Gran putting away a photograph or a letter, slipping it guiltily into her apron pocket, if he came unexpectedly into the room, and blotting tears from underneath her eyes—always sad and dark on those days, brown like Neville’s—like _Frank’s_—and folding and refolding one of her fine lawn handkerchiefs, edged in antique ivory tatting.

But Mrs Weasley was turning an age with a zero in it (exactly which age, he wasn’t certain; somehow Molly seemed ageless, like the fair folk, eternally maternal, and both slightly outraged and unflappable at the same time), and thus Neville had promised Ron he’d come. He had no idea why she’d wanted to have her birthday party at a Muggle pub; maybe she hadn’t even chosen the venue herself—it seemed like the kind of thing George might have done, telling everyone how fun and _different_ it would be. Neville lifted his hand to his forehead, shielding his eyes from the drizzly precipitate to look inside the Black Lab’s largest bay window. Ron was fastening Lily into a booster seat, and he could see Hermione and Ginny hugging each other, clinging together with what looked almost like desperation. Neville wasn’t particularly good with children. He was even worse with what he saw next: a flash of white-blonde hair as Draco Malfoy moved toward the table from the bar, two pints in each long-fingered hand, smiling at Mr Weasley as he handed one across the table to him, saying something to Ron over his shoulder. The window was fogged enough that they probably couldn’t see him, but he’d been there a while, watching everyone come in by the back, one by one, unable to go inside.

A car passed close by, and Neville cringed away, but it still splashed him with frigid gutter water. A Malfoy smiling was, in Neville’s view of the world, never a good sign, and generally ended with someone in the infirmary. But Draco was supposedly a reformed character, and Hermione, who was all about Mudblood Pride these days, was taking a perverse interest in said reformation, and kept inviting him to things. Even more bizarrely, he and Luna had struck up some sort of friendship, and Luna had him round to the flat more than once, to work on tea blends and tisanes together, at times when Neville contrived to be very much elsewhere.

What wasn’t entirely clear, to Neville, was why Draco kept agreeing to attend these events. Surely he had other friends who were more his type? Surely he had better ways to fill his evenings. Surely, Neville thought miserably; surely.

He had to close his eyes for a moment, then square his shoulders deliberately and step forward to make himself cross the street. One hour. Half an hour? Okay, forty minutes, tops. He just had to walk in, have one drink, and make his excuses. And deliver his gift to Mrs Weasley—a delicate baby houseplant he’d rooted himself, and was a little proud of. Then he could go home, put on pajama pants, make a cup of Luna’s purple earl grey, and curl up with their tabby kitten, Demetria; maybe work on the drawings for the book of herbalism they’d been working on together. He had a new set of fine-pointed ink pins and was itching to try them out.

Luna was already at the party, he remembered, hand on the pub’s brass doorknob, and Harry would be there, too; and this gave him the strength to go all the way inside, and smile at everyone the best he could, through their cries of welcome, some genuine, some surely feigned. Malfoy didn’t look over at him, engaged in some kind of intense conversation with Fleur, who gestured dangerously with a glass full of red wine.

“Thank Merlin you’re here,” said Harry, a little feverishly, and shook Neville’s icy hand with both of his, warm and solid.

“Wouldn’t have missed it,” Neville said, and felt himself start to thaw. There was some general back-clapping, and Ron volunteered to get him a pint. “Just a half,” he requested, as Luna took his gift. He unwound his scarf, then kissed Mrs Weasley on both already-flushed cheeks.

“Happy Christmas!” Molly said, beaming. She had a large bow made out of silver wrapping paper stuck on top of her head, and a baby Neville didn’t recognize on her hip, possibly one of Bill and Fleur’s.

“Yes, happy Christmas!” agreed Neville. It was the first week of October. With the timing of long practice, Ron shoved a brimming pint into his hand without spilling any of it. Ron had remembered his favourite Muggle beer, Irish cream ale. It gleamed warmly at him, almost Gryffindor red, below a thick head of foam. Neville took a gulp, and felt instantly better.

“Tradesies,” said Ron to Hermione, and handed her the other pint, whilst taking baby Fred off her hands. She accepted this exchange without a pause in the conversation, explaining something very philosophical and theoretical-sounding to Ginny, who had a proprietary hand on Hermione’s forearm. Ginny nodded intently, never taking her eyes from Hermione’s face, and was absently rubbing the inside of Hermione’s elbow with her thumb, small, subtle circles. Neville wondered, not for the first time, when Harry and Ron were going to figure this out; or, also not for the first time, if maybe they already knew and just didn’t care. The two of them were more laddish now than they’d ever been, spending their Ministry-free hours playing Muggle video games and ordering takeaway, for all the world as if they were still boys at school, not husbands, fathers, and Aurors. Neville figured maybe they needed the down time, between what were hellish, and fairly frequent at that, encounters with the new would-be Death Eaters. 

He had known from Hogwarts days that he’d be friends with his classmates for life, but Neville couldn’t have guessed how much they’d all change. Except for him, really, and Luna.

And maybe Malfoy. But Draco was, to his relief, ignoring him in favor of talking to the Delacour-Weasleys, who were apparently asking him about some abstruse infant-quelling potion for their new baby’s teething problems. That was good; Neville hadn’t seen him since that disastrous afternoon at the Annual Hogwarts Old Home tea, and he wasn’t eager to revisit it.

He sluiced water droplets off his hair with one hand, resigned himself to a full hour of being more or less convivial, and sat down on the trestle bench next to Harry.

“Birthdays,” Harry said, shaking his head, and that was all that needed to be said. They drank in companionable silence for a long moment, which was always one of the nicest things about Harry, now they were grown. You never felt ill at ease with him, or obliged to make small talk.

Unfortunately, though, the way Neville was sitting, he had a direct view of Draco’s profile as he chatted to Bill and Fleur, and looking in any other direction would require him initiating a conversation, which he had no intention of doing. On his left, Luna was inhaling, with an absorbed expression, a packet of salt and vinegar crisps, reminding him that on this seemingly unending and completely horrible Friday, he had been stuck at his station all day, and hadn’t eaten anything since a protein bar before he left their shared flat at nine in the bloody morning—a protein bar that claimed to be flavoured Cupcake with Rainbow Sprinkles, but honestly (he’d informed the kitten, making a face) tasted more like the hind end of a hippogriff.

He braced himself for the necessary exchange of information, and went to the bar to order a ploughman’s lunch, passing George, who gave him a quick elbow-bump and up-and-down flicker of the eyebrows, by way of greeting. When he sat back down, though, Harry had moved over by Ginny, who was now next to Hermione, and Draco was nearly opposite him.

What had happened at Old Home Week had been, by comparison to their school days, remarkably tame, but nonetheless it had finally brought up questions of just how safe everyone’s children really were at Hogwarts. If anyone were capable of acting in loco parentis it would be Minerva McGonagall; but the school continued to be plagued by the new Death Eaters, who hadn’t seemed to get the memo that the war was over and they’d lost. It hadn’t even begun to compare to the Battle, but there’d still been more than enough running and screaming to retraumatize everyone; Harry and Ron had fought off an actual troll—no one knew where they’d even _found_ one—and Malfoy’d had to go running from a Death Eater who accosted him, shrieking “Traitor! Traitor!”—until he stole a Hufflepuff’s broomstick and they wound up zooming around the courtyard, Malfoy angrily brandishing a silver tea tray, as tables were upended, small children wept, and cucumber-and-mint sandwiches flew everywhere.

(The Prophet, however, reported a sharp uptick in annual donations, so not everything was a total loss.)

Neville should probably be willing to admit he’s always had something of a crush on Malfoy—or, well, not always; but definitely since third year, when Draco stopped combing his hair back like a campy little vampire made in Lucius’s image, and it had started flopping down into his face. But Neville’s never told anyone, so it doesn’t even seem real, most of the time. The taunts and jeers certainly never stopped coming, and they were made all the worse by the occasional glimpses he had of Draco being unexpectedly human; once, coming around a corner of the east tower and finding him alone, slumped reading in an old armchair, too engrossed to even notice Neville, face empty of everything but pure fascination with the text; and maybe that other time, in Potions, when Draco had silently passed him a packet of the correct sort of crushed glimmerstone powder, underneath the table, without anyone’s noticing, and Neville had been almost too shocked to take it. But for the most part it had always been schoolyard cruelty followed by, predictably, Draco fleeing with his family, the Malfoys deserting like cowards when the wizarding world had been most in need of loyal followers. No one ever talked about it. Everyone acted like it had never happened. But Neville couldn’t forget. He wouldn’t.

Not even if Draco was Luna’s friend, now. And here, showing his punchable, unreasonably pretty face at Molly Weasley’s birthday party.

“Longbottom,” came the inevitable drawl. Neville resigned himself to his fate. Draco slid a ways down the long trestle bench until he was directly opposite Neville, with a smile Neville could only think of as smug. How unfair it was, he thought, that the one of them who should have had a terrible life was not only seemingly happy, but also somehow even hotter than before.

Under his breath, Neville muttered, “Here we go.”

“I'm sorry, were you addressing me?" Draco said, sounding kind of delighted, and not at all sorry. “Am I already disappointing you, Longbottom? Am I being terribly _myself?”_

“Oi, you two,” said Ron, but his heart wasn't in it; he was too busy trying to keep Lily from leaning over to spread applesauce in the baby's hair.

“How do you find Hogsmeade, Draco,” Hermione cut in smoothly. She kicked Neville under the table, which everyone could tell because he jumped. Baby Fred chose this precise moment to be sick, rather spectacularly, all over Mrs Weasley's jumper, which she took in stride as was her way. “I hear Dervish and Banges are expanding,” Hermione went on brightly, after applying a surreptitious clean-up spell to Mrs Weasley and handing Fred back to his father.

“Thank you for asking, Granger,” Draco said, unruffled. “We did add another branch nearer the train station, but for now I remain at the flagship store.”

“You, er, do the windows, and, and things?” Ron contributed, after a fierce look from Hermione.

“I am, in fact, a window dresser,” agreed Draco. Harry signalled to the waiter, looking flushed and a bit desperate.

“Well I think it's just lovely!” said Mr Weasley. “I admired that solstice display very much. The fairy lights! And the train set through the snow flurry was inspired.”

“It was Parvati’s idea to use quantum theory,” Draco said, with uncharacteristic modesty. “She’s really wasted as the CFO.”

“What is quantum theory?” asked Neville, curious despite himself.

“Bugger if I know,” Draco said, “but it’s what makes time go backward during the complicated bit.” He ate a chip, dragging it thoughtfully through his mayonnaise first, then made a face. “I’m sure Granger knows all about it. Anyway, I’m glad for the work. Keeps Narcissa in galleons.”

“And exactly how _is_ Narcissa?" said Harry, suddenly. He and Draco stared at each other across the table and for a moment it was dinner in the Great Hall all over again, everyone half-expected wands to appear. Then Draco shook his head.

“Crazy as a howling fantod, since Lucius died,” he said. “But she’s a Black, so. She’ll probably live to be a thousand, her and her imaginary friends. Actually it’s rather sweet, just last week they had a picnic for the, you know, rather more compos mentis patients at St. Mungo’s, and—”

“Oh _honestly_,” said Neville, startling himself. "Can we all stop acting like we're suddenly friends with Malfoy just because he's managing to hold down a bloody_ job?”_ An awkward silence settled over the table. Ron put back most of his pint, all in a go. Without moving, Mr Weasley refilled his own glass with something bright green and clearly very strong.

“Time for presents!” Luna sang out, oblivious as always, either that or madly strategic. She floated over to the pile at the end of the table and selected a small gift bag with greenery poking out of the top, and placed it in Mrs Weasley’s hands. “This looks like something with lots of life energy.”

“It’s mine,” Neville said, after Hermione had kicked him again. “It’s a spider plant.”

“A _what?!” _shrieked Mrs Weasley, standing in alarm and shoving away the bag. It toppled over onto the table and a thick spray of potting soil arced out, most of it going into Draco’s plate and onto his lap. Baby Fred reached out before anyone could stop him and, with one fat, star-fished hand, popped a lump into his mouth. He promptly looked uncertain, whether as to why he had done that, or what the outcome would be, he did not say (since he couldn’t talk yet, and also his mouth was full of earth). Ron had turned so pale you could see his freckles and had stood up next to Mrs Weasley, pulling her away from the table.

“For Merlin’s _sake_ Neville—when do they hatch—what were you thinking—there are small _children_ here—” everyone said, more or less all at once.

“It’s not, I wouldn’t!” he tried, reaching in to make sure the baby plant wasn’t damaged, and pulling it out of the bag to show them. There was a collective gasp and more recoiling.  
  
“No, it’s fine, not dangerous at all—it’s a _Muggle_ spider plant,” Draco said, soothingly, and somehow everyone turned to listen to _him_. “Just looks a bit, you know. Leggy and whatnot. You must admit, Muggles have quite the imagination.” He stood up, dusted off his trousers, and began helping Neville sweep up the remnants off the table with the cupped palm of his hand. For an instant Neville felt the warm skin of Draco’s wrist brush against his own. He jerked his hand back, and muttered something about the loo, and getting some paper towelling. Even turned away, though, the image of Draco Malfoy kneeling on the floor of his own volition to help clean up a mess he hadn’t made stayed in Neville’s mind, indelible.

•

In the bathroom, he washed the topsoil off the little plant’s leaves, then fidgeted with the collar of his dark blue-and-green plaid flannel, opening the first button to show the top of his plain army green t-shirt, then buttoning it closed again. He stood for a long time, staring at himself in the mirror. After all this time he still couldn’t get used to seeing himself in muggle clothes, and it was always even weirder to see Malfoy in them. Tonight, a long-sleeved heather grey t-shirt and soft, comfortable looking black jeans, laundered down almost to charcoal, as if he wore them often. Luna had told Neville he should wear more green, that it brought out the highlights in his eyes and hair. Neville had told her that hanging about so much with Draco brought out the highlights in her utter nonsense; but he had gone back to his room that night, looked up colour wheels on the Internet, and privately started educating himself as to the difference between contrasting and complementary, triadic and tetradic, shade and tint, tone and hue. He hadn’t wanted to admit it at the time, but it had been the beginning, for him, of the theory that now informed his quotidian working life. Without saying anything to his clients about it, he could silently adjust the (usually garish) colours they’d chosen to something more harmonious, and give their tattoo art a more defined presence, make its brights brighter and its depths richer, turn it into something that—

“All right then, Nev?” came a voice at his elbow. Neville didn’t startle; it was George.

“Well enough,” Neville said, automatically, and reached to turn off the cold tap, which for some reason he’d left running. He dried off his hands with a quick spell and told himself to snap out of it.

George was flicking at his hair impatiently with his wand, adding and removing a streak of white. “I never can decide about this,” he said, apparently deciding, or at any rate leaving it there and sleeving his wand. “Had it since the Battle.”

Of course. Neville swallowed. “If you had more of that ink, we could use it.”

George brightened. “Like it, do they?”

“Very much.” Neville had recently begun adding a subtle magical shimmer to his metallics with the aid of something George called, unromantically, unicorn snot, but which Neville told people was a special iridescent pigment. It was, in fact, snot, just not from a unicorn. Neville didn’t ask questions; he merely paid George’s ridiculous prices and passed the steep markup along to his clients, who seemed thrilled with the results, which rippled minutely with muscles and skin, and cast tiny holographic rainbows, like an infinitesimal aurora borealis.

“You work too hard,” George said, and Neville had to snap himself out of a fugue state again, thinking about a design of the constellation Vulpecula, stars picked out on a background of swirling deep-sea galaxies, the fox carrying a branch of flowering rosemary in its mouth, instead of the traditional slain goose, with a scroll winding around its burnt-matchstick paws. What would it say? Something in Greek, something magical and wise, peaceful and healing.

“Yeah, I do,” he agreed, and they headed back out to the clamour of the pub.

•

Draco and Harry were arm-wrestling, and Neville nearly walked into a beam.

Draco had his shirt sleeve shoved up, and Neville realized he had a single earring, a small silver hoop in his left ear, with a wink of amethyst—a captive bead, but not a colour Neville had expected. But why not; they weren’t schoolboys anymore, slavishly devoted to their houses. Why shouldn’t Malfoys wear colours that weren’t black or silver or poison green.

“Oh bugger,” Harry said faintly, and Draco laughed as they both strained, until finally, slowly but ineluctably, the back of Draco’s hand descended, and hit the table with a thwack. Harry crowed, and Ron slapped him on the back.

“Right, this one’s on me,” Draco said, and stood up, as Ginny rolled her eyes and mouthed something at Hermione, no doubt about the patriarchy or testosterone. The thing was, Neville didn’t think she was wrong, but he also wasn’t going to complain about a free pint.

He sat down next to her and she promptly put an arm around him, and gazed into his face, unruffled by social convention that might suggest one do otherwise.

“You look tired,” Luna said, matter-of-factly.

“Better than being nosy,” he meant to retort, but then Malfoy put another pint of russet-coloured cream ale in front of him, and he forgot to be offended (the circles under his eyes weren’t _that_ dark) in favour of tracing an idle pattern in the foam slopped over onto the table; another constellation, another tattoo.

“Scorpio,” said Malfoy. He sat back down, and this time Neville did startle.

“How did you, that’s,” but Malfoy just shrugged, the old elegant one, with one slim shoulder, that made Neville think he was about to unleash something deeply barbed.

“Draco always was very good in Astronomy,” said Luna, in her mild way, and Neville didn’t quite know what to make of any of this, so he took an extra-large swallow of ale.

Luna promptly deserted him, the wretch, getting up to dance with Hermione to a song she declared her absolute favorite, in which the female singer kept requesting to be kissed in the barley. They joined hands and swung around in half-circles in front of the Muggle music box as gravely as if they were going round a Maypole. Neville faced his tea feeling a bit glum, because he’d expected something...well, more delicious-looking, and this was on a par with the rest of his day: a packet of crisps and a dried-up looking sandwich, which he began to disassemble with a sigh.

“Don’t you hate it when they make the sandwich for you,” said Draco, musingly, as if half to himself. Neville almost dropped his slice of tomato, at the sound of his voice.

“I do, a bit,” he said, though, after a moment, Gran Longbottom’s manners kicking in. And there _was_ something homely and consoling about putting together the pieces of a ploughman’s yourself, a bit of cheese onto a piece of bread, with a dollop of chutney, and—

“It’s so comforting,” Draco went on, still in that contemplative tone. “The wholemeal bread. The sharpness of the cheese, and the pickle.” Why was he being so—_ordinary?_

“Wouldn’t have figured you to have opinions about pub lunches,” Neville said, shortly, and bit into a radish to stop himself saying more, or worse. He should apologise, but couldn’t bring himself to do so.

Draco laughed a little. “You’d be surprised. I generally had to fend for myself when I was a boy, everyone being busy with their fascistic plans for world dominance.”

Neville swallowed hard, but the bit of radish stayed stuck; he had to take a long pull off his pint to get it to go down. “Was it really the _whole_ world, though,” he heard himself say, with unexpected wryness, and Draco laughed out loud this time, a full and delighted one.

“All right: the wizarding world. Or mostly the EU.”

He swallowed again. “The what?”

“The European Union, or what’s about to be left of it. You know, I’ve been following some interesting people lately on Muggle Twitter.”

“On Muggle _what?” _He looked around covertly for Luna.

“Oh do keep up, Longbottom. It’s been ages since we were fending for our lives in a castle on the Scottish highlands, even you can’t possibly be this dialled out.”

“Try me,” said Neville, without thinking, and Draco, unimaginably, laughed again, and bumped Neville’s knee with his own, under the table. Neville blinked. _Draco Dormiens Nunquam Titillandus,_ he thought, out of nowhere.

“Maybe I will, at that,” said Draco; and this time the knee stayed pressed against him—just lightly, but deliberately enough that Neville could feel Draco’s shin against his own. 

Suddenly he remembered Luna laughing at him once, for being shocked that a customer had given him her phone number, and telling him that clients flirted with him _all the time_, that he was actually fit; and he had no idea what to do with this information, or if it were even true. He tried to focus on his sandwich and the memory of the Malfoys running across the bridge away from Hogwarts, pell-mell, as if their lives had depended on it.

He supposed their lives _had_ depended on it. But so had his, and he’d stayed, and fought, and he had the scars to show for it.

“Neville doesn’t need Twitter,” said Hermione, from his other side, saving him once again, and he felt a wash of gratitude. Under her leather jacket she was wearing a black t-shirt with hot pink letters reading ASK ME ABOUT MY MUDBLOOD, and a chain necklace with rainbow-coloured metallic rings. Her hair was straightened these days and dyed very dark black, with bright chartreuse tips, about which he’d already heard Arthur tutting. She was clearly in the throes of some kind of postpartum crisis, to which Ron was just as clearly completely oblivious.

“If I did, I reckon you’d tell me,” he said back, and they smiled at each other, only a little uncertainly. He offered her his crisps and she shook her head, necklace tinkling.

“How’s the sprog, then,” he said, after another moment, during which he inched his leg away from Malfoy’s. Draco seemed to get the hint, and he stood up and wandered over to chat with Ron. Neville wondered if everyone had forgotten about the war but him.

“Honestly? It’s a bit like bringing a very tiny Dementor to live in your home,” Hermione began, and then, to Neville’s great relief, she told him all about it in fierce and attentive detail.

At that moment a new, creamy-topped pint appeared on the table next to his arm, and he looked round only to see Ginny’s bright hair as she waved him off affectionately and turned back to Harry. All he had were his friends; but that was enough.

•

The party took on its own kind of momentum and Neville, fortified by ale, forgot about leaving. He danced once each with Luna and Fleur, played table football (him, Hermione and Harry against George, Ron and Bill) and even a round of darts with Mr and Mrs Weasley (Molly won). Malfoy continued to be charming and ever-present and attractive, and Neville continued to seethe quietly, but kept it to himself, since no one else seemed to have a problem but him.

The strangest moment of the evening, though, came when the waitstaff presented Mrs Weasley with a small chocolate cake. It was topped with actual burning wax candles, like a spell, and they sang an odd song to which only Harry and Hermione really seemed to know all the words, though Arthur was singing along with great zest. Neville found himself standing next to Malfoy, both of them clapping gamely with everyone else, but having no idea what was happening. Both the fire and the song seemed to go on for a very long time.

“The fuck are they singing?” Malfoy whispered to him, looking increasingly horrified. “It's just the same words, over and over.”

“Merlin knows,” Neville whispered back, grudgingly, but he kept clapping along, nodding and trying to smile (albeit in a sort of ghastly way) to show nothing was amiss. Just when they thought the song was over, there was a second, even longer part, about how she was a jolly good fellow and nobody could deny it. This was not only untrue but just went to show that the writer of the song definitely hadn’t had Mrs Weasley in mind, since she was about as jolly as a broadsword. They finished with a burst of applause. Draco leaned back over into Neville’s space.

“Aren’t we going to sing the real birthday song?”  
  
“Doubt it,” said Neville, thinking of the pub’s predominantly Muggle clientele, as well as the fact that it was nowhere near midnight. But after Molly blew out her candles, Arthur cleared his throat and began, in a wobbling but somber baritone:

> _Upon this night was born a mage  
Whose powers do increase with age!  
_

“Oh no,” said Malfoy, and took an instinctive step backward. Neville couldn’t help but agree. The wizarding birthday song was twenty-eight verses long and involved house rivalry, the origins of magic, quite a lot about different breeds of dragons, and had a stanza in Parseltongue.

But they all joined in, dutifully, in a droning minor key (with Luna on high harmony):

> _Beware the wrath! Beware the rage!  
Of our esteeméd birthday mage!_

Neville could hear the conversation in the rest of the pub fall quiet, table by table, and by the time they got to the Parseltongue bit, which Harry obligingly hissed his way through, and then the song’s conclusion, he could feel everyone in the restaurant staring at them.

> _And so we wish our wizard well,  
The birthday bell has rung its knell!  
_ _We hope the crystal ball will tell  
Of years to come both fair and fell!  
_
> 
> _You are a witch most frightful, dear,  
_ _Your spells quite terrible to hear!  
With ample draughts of butterbeer,  
May you sur-vive an-oth-er ye-ar!  
_

They dragged out the last line, as was customary, and the plaintive melody resolved itself, as best it could, on an augmented chord. There was a long silence.

“What...what _was_ that?” said their waiter, her tray dangling at her side, face blank with shock.

“Er,” said Hermione. “We’re Australian.”

•

After that the children more or less fell asleep sitting up, sedated post-sugar by one of Luna’s light Drowsilica spells, and the adults embarked on more uninterrupted conversation. In particular, Draco took the opportunity to pepper Hermione with polite, earnest questions about Muggle life. To Neville’s surprise she answered thoughtfully and thoroughly, rocking Baby Fred and taking Draco, to all appearance, very seriously. And they were good questions, too, questions Neville had never thought about asking, maybe because he didn’t want to seem like one of _those_ wizards, the kind who were always saying things like “one of my best friends is a Muggle.” Draco’s inquiries were sensitive, but fearless, even when he asked Hermione to recommend some Critical Mudblood Theory texts (there was a stifled gasp from the elder Weasleys, who excused themselves not long afterward; Neville helped Arthur put all of Molly’s presents into the new car he’d bought her, which had something called a hatchback).

To be fair, it was growing late, or so Neville began to think after first the Weasleys left, and then Bill and Fleur, and George said he had to open up shop in the morning, and Hermione had a breakfast meeting to which Ginny was invited, and then somehow, Neville wasn’t quite sure how, he found himself sitting alone in a corner with Draco Malfoy, both of them nursing snifters of brandy which Draco had ordered while the waitstaff put chairs up on tables and cleared away detritus from the party. He thought blurrily that this turn of events might have something to do with the fact that he and Draco had also started doing shots of Jameson along with their pints a while ago, maybe around the time everyone had taken their kids and gone home.

He folded and refolded a bit of wrapping paper into smaller and smaller squares, mostly so he didn’t have to look at Draco. Somehow Neville had also shifted to calling him _Draco_, instead of _Malfoy. _Somehow he was telling him about the time his uncle had dropped him out of a window.

“He did _what?”_ said Draco, horrified. Neville thought that was an odd reaction.

“Well,” said Neville. “Stands to reason. Had to see if I wasn’t a squib after all.”

“No, he didn’t,” Draco said, and took one of Neville’s hands. Neville frowned at this, but couldn’t think of a good reason why he needed both of his hands. The bit of wrapping paper fell to the floor. “He really didn’t. If you were a squib, you couldn’t have helped it. And you could have been killed. How in Merlin’s green wood is this _reasonable?”_ He struggled a little, with the last word.

“Exhibited squibbish tendencies, didn’t I?” Neville got most of that out alright, and then drank the rest of his brandy, with his free hand.

“Nonsense,” said Draco. “The way we punish squibs for not being like us, it’s preposterous. And cruel. And, and, and _ableist_. Ye gods—whoever heard of putting an _infant_ out of a _window.”_

Now he mentioned it, Neville thought maybe it was a bit off. “Strange thing was, I actually did wandless magic, when I was a baby. There’s a bit of irony for you.”

Draco didn’t say anything for a moment and Neville thought he was still angry. But when he spoke, his voice was soft, and his touch was gentle. “Of course you did. Longbottom, you’ve always had a kind of power I envied.” He turned Neville’s hand over, and one finger traced the edge of ink just beneath the cuff of Neville’s shirt. “What’s this?”

Unusually, for a tattoo artist, Neville didn’t have any tattoos except one, and he hadn’t inked it himself; someone whose name he couldn’t remember had given it to him, in a seedy parlor somewhere in Brighton and Hove, the night Hannah had finally left him, saying their marriage had been over for months now and she’d best be getting on with things. “Things” turned out to be Dean Thomas, and he couldn’t blame her; Dean had grown up gorgeous and cheerful and she deserved that, or so Neville had drunkenly informed the guy wielding the needle; she deserved everything Neville couldn’t give her and he didn’t understand why not—he loved Hannah, he insisted, he _loved her!_—and the guy just sighed and nodded and pocketed his sixty quid. He was a thin wiry bloke with a northern accent who’d taken one look and then pity on him, given him a small solid black heart just below his wrist bone, though he muttered the whole time that he shouldn’t even be doing it, drunk as Neville was; and then taken him into a room even further back in the parlor and given him a slow tender blow job out of what seemed like pure sympathy. Or maybe because it was Pride Week.

"Anyway," he concluded, "that was the first time I really knew."

"Jesus Merlin," said Draco. "That’s the saddest fucking thing I’ve ever heard. Let me see it," and for a protracted dizzying moment, Neville didn’t realize he meant the tattoo. Then he pushed up his sleeve and Draco ran the cool pad of a fingertip across the bone. Neville shivered.

“I always knew,” said Draco. “About myself, I mean.”

“Even at school?” Neville asked. They hadn’t spoken of Hogwarts, probably because—  
  
“Of course at school, why else do you think I was such an unmitigated bloody git?”

Neville wanted to say that wasn’t the case, but he couldn’t, and they both knew it; and then they were laughing.  
  
“You were _awful.”_

“The worst,” Draco agreed. “Just fucking insufferable, and also trying so hard not to be posh I had some bizarre kind of affected—”

“Essex accent,” finished Neville. He couldn’t believe they were talking about this. “Yes, why _did_ you always sound like a West Ham supporter?”

“Goyle,” said Draco, briefly. He picked up one of the shot glasses that still had anything left in it, and threw it back, then did the same with another, licking the last of it off his lips. “Sodding Greg Goyle. I would have done anything, at that point, to have a friend.”

They sat a moment in silence, in memory of the dead and the lost and the aching realities that survived them—both, Neville realized, of their mothers insane, both having lost—

“Ugh, this is awful,” said Draco, his voice gone husky and oddly tender, and then he had an arm wrapped around Neville, and then the other, and they were sat on the trestle bench in the most awkward position possible, half-sideways, arms around each other. Neville started to laugh, then stopped, because he realized if he let himself, he might start to cry. They’d made it through a war together, after all, even if on opposite sides.

“Let’s never do this again,” Draco said, and then stood up. He had to steady himself with a hand on Neville’s shoulder. One of Neville’s flew up instinctively, to cover it, not wanting to lose the touch. Draco’s hands weren’t cold, like he had assumed they would be, but warm, warm and a little rough, strong and male, and—“by which I mean, what are you doing next Thursday?”

“Drinking with you?” Neville asked, having trouble with the consonants.  
  
“Throw in dinner and it’s a date,” said Draco, and after a quick look up and down the pub—no one was there but a bartender adding up totals on the till and yawning—he Apparated away, so fast that Neville still had his mouth open to ask what, just exactly, Draco meant by a _date._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> NB that the first verse of the wizarding birthday song was written by [ExpatGirl](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ExpatGirl/works); after which, I kind of lost my mind.


	2. Chapter 2

It turned out that when Draco Malfoy said _date_, he really did mean it. Long before Thursday, however, Neville had to cross a veritable no man’s land of aggressive interventions from his well-intentioned friends, meaning Hermione. Hermione was the only other one of them who carried a mobile, because of her parents, who thought she was a barrister. (“The Wizengamot isn’t _not_ like a court of law,” she reasoned, which was, Neville thought, very like something an actual barrister would say. He could tell she had an exceptionally bright future ahead of her.)

It wasn’t even noon the next day before she sent him the emoji equivalent of a Howler. While Neville was still trying to figure out how to respond to “NEVILLE FRANCIS LONGBOTTOM DID YOU SERIOUSLY PULL MALFOY LAST NIGHT OR WERE YOU JUST HAVING HIM ON SO YOU COULD HEX HIM 😜🤪,” he then received a series of unpunctuated and rambling phrases involving the apparently pulchritudinous assets of a Muggle actress named, improbably, Gal Gadot, with representative pictures of her in lingerie, followed by: “oops sorry wrong chat 🙃”. Later, there were several more increasingly frantic messages, ending with “nev i’m dead serious what’s going on, it’s one thing to hang out at a pub but what happened, didn’t want to leave you there alone with him but fred was poorly, TALK TO ME PLEASE”

Neville didn't really know what to make of any of that, least of all the part where he actually did have a date next week with Draco, so he just texted back, “sorry, clients, busy!” and hoped that would take care of the matter—though he knew this new (and possibly improved) Hermione too well for that. Besides, he had yet to get Draco’s address from her so he could owl him; and before he could do that, he needed to figure out where to take him for dinner. Most of Neville’s post-divorce meals were either fish and chip butties from the sketchy chippie on the corner, or something ominously named “box of meal” from the doner kebab van outside the tattoo parlor (which was, quite literally, a small waxed box filled with whatever they had that day, generally some mixture of rice, bits of meat, and a sauce vaguely like cheese)—whereas Draco was probably used to the prix fixe menu at Eternelle’s, the private back room no one knew about.

Which is why he was completely gobsmacked when instead Draco owled _him_, and told him to come by his flat, that he was going to cook for him. Apparently Draco lived in Kensington, because of course he did; so Neville had a frantic last-minute search in the tattoo parlor's lost-and-found cupboard for a shirt with a collar. Fortunately someone drunk had left a rather nice white one that Neville threw a quick tailoring charm over, and Luna said looked well enough, with a similarly discarded blue necktie. He stopped at Sainsburys for a bouquet of chrysanthemums, and then the off-license for a bottle of some unfancy but sturdy-seeming champagne, and was in danger of being late, but Apparated onto the front steps of Draco’s building just in time to tidy his hair, check the knot of his tie, and tuck his shirt in a bit better before ringing the bell.

Luna had also stopped him with one hand, just before he left through the parlour’s front door, and drawn him back into their small office, where she selected a bottle of something from her shelves of hundreds—all the same, little square atomisers he didn’t know how she could tell apart, and spritzed him in the hollow of his throat. Neville sniffed, but couldn’t detect anything much, just a general aroma of garden.

“Just, sometimes you smell like antiseptic when you leave,” she said, and patted his arm.

“Luna, do you think I’m—” he couldn’t say, _mad._

She looked up at him, head on one side. She’d taken to wearing her long flaxen hair in a coronet of braids, above scarves and shawls and skirts in layers, with pointelle leggings and little lace-up boots. It suited her, and he found himself wondering for the thousandth time why they couldn’t have fallen in love. But Luna was too good for someone like him.

“Not at all,” she said, in her clear voice. “Or that is, no more than anyone else. Give Draco a chance. Nothing has come as easily for him as you might think.”

•

Malfoy buzzed him up, so Neville had a short walk to the lift, and plenty of time once there to panic some more. Ron had sent him exactly one owl, with a scrawled message reading “WOT’S THIS ABOUT MALFOY THEN YOU SAD BASTERD,” to which Neville had also not responded; but truly, what in Merlin’s name was he doing? He’d fobbed off Hermione for days by alternately ignoring her pleas for information and distracting her with photos of the kitten, but she and the rest really had to be wondering if Neville had finally gone round the bend like his poor parents. Luna, fortunately, passed no judgment; she had only smiled at him dreamily, and quoted from some poem about an urn and maidens, that Neville didn’t understand. He was used to not always understanding Luna, but he thought now he should have asked her outright whether this wasn’t perhaps the worst idea he’d ever had. He stared down at the paper bundle of chrysanthemums, bright yellow and hideous, and couldn’t believe he hadn’t made his own bouquet; Draco deserved something elegant. He should have bound long blue irises in a ballet wrap, with maybe carrot flowers, or blue chamomile, and definitely lavender.

But Neville stopped minding as soon as he saw him. Draco opened the door and was rumpled and disconcertingly, even distressingly, normal-looking, and _handsome,_ in muted gray jeans and an unbuttoned light blue dress shirt, with a grey t-shirt beneath, and his hair pulled back. He waved Neville inside with a spatula in one hand, and promptly returned to doing something in a saucepan. Whatever it was smelled fragrant and inviting, and sizzled a little. Draco gave it another stir, turned off the flame, and only then did Neville hand him the flowers and wine. He was sure he was blushing again, and a little angry about it, which made him gruff.

“Thought champagne would go with anything,” he said, and then froze, because Draco was leaning up to kiss him on the cheek, and he smelled a little like vetiver, and a lot like vanilla and grass, and overall like something that went straight to the back of Neville’s brainstem and rang his entire body like a bell. He wanted him so suddenly and so completely that he froze in place.

“Perfect,” Draco said. He pulled away before Neville could react, and handed him a sharp knife, which Neville stood there holding stupidly while Draco looked in a cupboard for, presumably, a vase. “We’re having portabella Wellington, with a roasted winter root-vegetable purée—which I promise is much less disgusting than it sounds.”

Neville cleared his throat and made an effort to sound normal. “No, that sounds brilliant.” He’d forgotten to eat, again, all day, and had wound up taking two extra customers because Luna had been cleaning up after the kitten and working on her tisane blends for something called Etsy. He didn’t mind; he needed the money. But now his stomach rumbled at the good smell of herbs in butter.

He shook himself mentally, and put the knife down on the counter in order to remove his jacket. It was warm in the little—actually, _surprisingly_ little—kitchen, and steamy, and he rolled up his shirtsleeves and meekly accepted the job of trimming flower stems and sticking them in the container Draco had given him, which seemed to be a cut-glass lemonade pitcher. He wanted to make a joke about it, but felt too uncertain. In between stems he stole glances at the apartment, which was just one large room. There were several glazed pots of small orange trees lined up against the plate-glass balcony doors, looking out over a walled garden, and some window boxes with herbs. A shoji screen in the corner blocked the bed from view; shelves bore doubled-up rows of books, with messy stacks of them everywhere else, and a desk was covered with papers and more books and, Neville noticed, a rose-gold Muggle laptop.

“I’d give you the tour, but that’s about the size of it,” said Draco, waving. He set a pair of flutes at Neville’s elbow and returned to his velouté. “Without the estate, my finances are no more; and I absolutely refuse to have roommates, after years and years of bloody school.”

This, Neville could completely understand; he made a sound of assent. If he weren't living above the shop with Luna, he had no idea where he would be. Possibly in Ron and Hermione's spare room, providing free childcare. On her days off, Luna sometimes communed with the Nargles by playing a small porcelain ocarina; otherwise she was an unimpeachable flatmate, always did the washing-up and put away her laundry and remembered when their light bill was due.

Draco turned off the saucepan again and eased the champagne cork from the bottle’s neck, pouring them each a glass. “To solitude? No, that’s not quite right, given the occasion.”

“To not being at school anymore. Or at war,” Neville said, and their glasses met each other with a satisfying _clink_, just firm enough to make the crystal ring.

“Cheers to that,” said Draco fervently, and sipped at his champagne, eyelashes lowered, cheeks flushed in such a way that Neville had to fight not to stare at him. He was a completely different creature here, in his home, loose-limbed and comfortable and relaxed, as Neville supposed was true of everyone; but the transformation was more shocking when it was Draco Lucius Malfoy.

“Living room?”

Neville nodded, and then trailed after Draco to a large black oversized sofa. Draco moved more books to the floor with a wandless tidying spell and they fluttered obediently down and sorted themselves, spines aligned, making room for Neville on the other end. “I’ve been reading Muggle history,” Draco said. “Really quite violent. Can’t read it at all before bedtime.”

Neville had done work for returning Muggle soldiers, and heard their stories. He nodded again.

“So how are things in the tattoo business?” asked Draco, as if reading his mind.

Neville took a fortifying swallow of the champagne. “Word’s gotten out a bit, so we’re busy. Which I quite like.”

Draco curled his feet under him. “Do you have an Instagram?”

Neville blinked at him. “Instawhat?” It sounded like a Transfiguration charm, something to do with messaging, he figured. To be honest he’d never worked out what e-mail was, and only texted because of Hermione, who’d insisted on his learning how to save photos of his best work on his phone.

“Instagram. It’s all the rage, you can post pictures and captions and—here, give us your mobile.”

Bemused, Neville handed it to him, after unlocking it. Within a few minutes Draco had set up an account, and @landltattoos was theirs.

“There you go,” said Draco, and finished off his champagne. “Now you’re in business.”

Neville refrained from saying that in fact they’d been in business since he’d been shown the door by Hannah and lost his grandmother in the same month, but he didn’t think you should talk about exes or dead relatives on a date. Instead he showed Draco a photo on his phone of a tattoo he’d done that day, feathery botanical dandelions on the forearms of a young woman who wanted to cover up scars left by self-harm. It had taken a long time, because Neville wanted them to be perfect, and she’d almost cried, but Luna’s soothing pink tea helped her get through the whole session, and she left beaming, radiant even, tiny flawless yellow flowers and slender green grass blades peeking out from beneath the cuffs of her jumper.

“You have to post that one first, it’s stunning,” said Draco. “How did you learn this, anyway?”

Of all the things Neville had expected, it wasn’t that Draco would be so easy to talk to. They ate on the sofa, off large handpainted Italian bowls, and without his realizing it, he’d given a full account of teaching himself pen-and-ink linework from Herbology textbooks, and then practicing on himself with evaporating ink during that long bleak period of being stuck in the Room of Requirement. That got them through the starter (pear and walnut confit with Camembert) and into the Wellington, which was creamy and savoury, and Neville had to work hard not to wolf it down. Somehow he found himself telling Draco about how he and Luna had gotten in trouble in second year for innocently trading white sage and damiana cigarettes to their unsuspecting classmates.

“I’m sorry, you did what?” said Draco, coughing and laughing at the same time. “How have I never heard about this—were you _trying_ to get expelled?” Neville had the sudden impulse to reach across the table and take his hand, but he didn’t. “Surely you lost house points.”

“No, but not on Pomfret’s account—she was all for it, after a couple of them wound up in infirmary,” he said, instead.

“I’m sure she was,” Draco said. “Damiana is strong stuff.”

“We didn’t know; we were just after chocolate frogs.” Neville always forgot that Draco knew his herbs. Draco knew other stuff, too, apparently, which is why he set aside his empty bowl and napkin and took Neville’s hand again, tracing the veins on his wrist, fingers skating over the skin. In lieu of saying anything, Neville just squeezed his hand a little, let go, and then, unsure what to do next, took too large a mouthful of puff pastry. He hadn’t flirted with anyone since Hannah, and he had no idea at all how to go about it anymore.

“I’m sorry, that was forward of me,” said Draco, after a pause. He stood up and went to the kitchen, and came back with two dessert glasses full of Gryffindor mess, which Neville hadn’t had since school: pale new strawberries, and (he tried first a small taste and then a much larger one) bright red pomegranate juice over meringue nests. They were perfect, tangy without being too tart, sweet without being too sweet. Without thinking he watched Draco’s tongue as he licked a drop of syrup off the edge of his spoon.

Neville swallowed. “It’s, it’s fine. And this is amazing. I haven’t had it in ages.” It was, in fact, a favourite of Gran’s. “Reading anything besides Muggle history?”

“Mostly Spore’s _One Thousand Magical Herbs and Fungi_. Luna and I are about ready to open the Etsy shop, I think.” Neville knew of their difficulties given the delicacy required in making herbal blends for Muggles, who were generally unconvinced of the effects of magic and yet profoundly susceptible to its effects. “Everything Luna tries, I have to make her weaken by a factor of ten, until it’s basically homeopathy. Muggles are so _sensitive.”_

“So are you. I mean—you’re different now,” Neville blurted out. Something complicated happened on Draco’s face.

“I’m trying to be,” Draco said, at last, looking away. The curve of his cheekbone was something Neville had been looking at for years, but glancingly, out of the corner of his eye, not letting himself linger on it in case he would be noticed, and ridicule were to follow. This time he let himself look. Draco took a long breath in, then turned back around. “I know I was rotten, at school. I was mostly about ready to piss myself at any given moment, but that’s no excuse.”

“I liked you anyway,” Neville said, to his own horror. Then, since he was clearly in blurting mode, he heard himself continuing to talk, disconcerted. “I make alimony payments,” he said, and felt himself beginning to blush furiously, again, the splotchy unattractive one. “To Hannah. Since the divorce, I mean.” Why was he saying these things? Anyone who read the Prophet would know about his divorce, anyway. Any time any of them did anything the least bit ordinary, like having babies or breaking up, it made the front page. And it had been four years.

Draco didn’t seem thrown, though. “That hardly seems fair.”

“Well, but,” Neville said, and looked down at his glass. “She was well-off, before we married, and the Cauldron…it’s not been doing well, what with the trouble at Hogwarts.”

“Still,” said Draco. “Working extra hours, I expect.”

“A few,” said Neville. He hadn’t even been up to the flat, some weekend nights, the last couple of months; he’d had Luna mind the kitten, who’d taken to peeing in his sneakers in protest, and taken customers as long as they’d kept coming in. Things were a bit tight, he couldn’t deny it. With Gran Longbottom’s inheritance he and Luna had been able to buy L & L Ink outright, but they’d had to fix up the place themselves, and it was still very much what Luna liked to call “shabby chic,” which really meant they couldn’t afford to replace the wallpaper, and had to stamp the concrete floor in blue-and-white patterns with a sponge shaped optimistically like a cloud. Luna did all of the bookkeeping herself, which occasionally meant they were short some months and wildly over, others, while Neville repaired anything broken. He did his meticulous filigree and watercolour botanical inking whenever he could, and bit his lip and did other tattoos when they were requested (once, worst of all, a long quotation on a man’s chest from someone named Churchill, in a truly hideous typeface, in the middle of a garish Union Jack).

“The exchange rate can’t be very good,” Draco observed.

“Yeah, it’s a bit rubbish,” said Neville. “But we do alright.”

“I wasn’t criticising,” said Draco. “I just—you do look peaky.”  
  
“Peaky,” repeated Neville.

“Like you need more sleep, is all. And possibly more dessert.”

“I’m fine,” Neville said, and then watched himself, as if from a great distance, put down his glass and pull Draco toward him. Draco came without the least bit of resistance, and then they were kissing, and it was tentative, cautious, but their mouths met as unerringly as if they did this all the time, and Draco’s lips were soft. He pulled back for a breath and Draco came after him, straddled Neville’s lap, wound his arms around Neville’s neck, and they kissed some more.

“You smell amazing,” said Draco, and bit his neck. “Like tomato vines in summer.”

“Luna, she,” was as far as Neville got, and then Draco kissed his way up the side of Neville’s neck and along his jaw, until their mouths met again, and this time clung. Kissing Draco was like your first broom takeoff, that sudden sense of your center of gravity coming right out from under you, and everything speeding past just a little bit faster than your stomach was ready for. It was also somehow frustrating, but Neville told himself not to be weird about it, and tightened his hands on Draco’s hips. Draco moaned a little, and his mouth opened and their tongues touched, as something a little wild shook loose inside of Neville, and threatened to spill over.

“Shit,” said Draco, moving just far enough away to drag in air. “Were you always this good a kisser?”  
  
Neville didn’t think they were quite in sync, truthfully; something was off, he wasn’t sure what. He didn’t reply, just looked at Draco’s mouth, flushed and a little wet.

“I know you weren’t always this gorgeous,” Draco went on; and that was it, that was the problem. Neville pulled back, out of reach of Draco’s mouth, and twisted his head to one side. “Is that all this is,” he said, stung. “That I’m—that I’m—?” He couldn’t finish.

“Of course not,” said Draco, still struggling a little for breath. Neville kept his face averted. “How can you possibly think—okay fine, I might have started to notice you in sixth year because you were so—so beautiful. But you did what no one else could, that day. We were all so afraid. I was there. I saw it. I watched you, you—_hobble_ across that bloody courtyard, and take off Nagini’s head in one slice, fuck, I’d been terrified of her for _months_—and you just _did_ it—”

“I had to,” said Neville, simply. He’d been just as terrified, but somehow holding the sword had made it clear, what he was there to do, and once he’d known, there was no getting out of it.

“You didn’t. That’s why you’re _you.”_

“Okay,” Neville agreed, just so that they could stop talking about it.

“And I’m sorry for what I said,” breathed Draco, nuzzling the spot underneath Neville’s ear that made him shiver.

“Which time,” said Neville, not even trying to be funny; and Draco didn’t laugh.

“At the pub, I said something naff about St Mungo’s. I didn’t mean it.”

“Look, just—don’t,” said Neville, which meant maybe several things at once, none of which he wanted to examine too closely: _don’t talk, don’t apologise, don’t remind me, don’t make this real—_

“About your parents,” Draco clarified, and now Neville really had to stop kissing him. He rested his head against Draco’s chest and tried to catch his breath, and to gather courage for the next part, which meant getting up and walking out the door. He couldn’t, but he also couldn’t stay.

“You just can’t leave well enough alone, can you,” he said, finally, and lifted Draco off of him, one hand still on each hip. Draco’s eyes went wide, but he left Neville shift him, and then Neville was standing, and automatically patting down his own pockets for his wallet and mobile.

“Wait,” said Draco. “I didn’t mean—I’m sorry.”

“It’s alright,” Neville said. “This was not a good idea.”

“Just—_wait,”_ Draco said again, and now they were both standing, one hand of Draco’s on Neville’s elbow. “I know, all right? We don’t have to talk about it tonight, or ever. I’m—I can’t fix everything, or maybe any of it, and I know that. Just, don’t leave like this.” He looked sharply up at Neville, who thought he saw something less like fear on Draco’s face, and more like worry and concern. “Neville, when’s the last time you slept through the night?”  
  
“What?”

“Slept,” Draco enunciated, “all night, properly, without waking. I assume you have nightmares, I know I still do. Yours must be corkers.”

“What’s that got to do with anything,” said Neville, and moved to get his jacket from where he’d left it, folded on a stool by the kitchen.

“Rather a lot,” Draco said, and followed him, and reached out to take the jacket back. For one insane second Neville thought they were going to play tug-of-war with it. But for reasons he didn’t understand, after a moment, he let Draco pull it gently from his hands. “Just stay, tonight—we don’t have to quarrel. You’re clearly exhausted.”

“I’m not,” he said, but it was among his worse lies, and he’d never been good at them anyway.

“Bollocks.”

“Okay maybe I’m a bit tired, but that’s not—I don’t know why it—what are you—”

“Shush,” said Draco. He put the jacket back down, took Neville by one hand, and led him over to the screen in the room’s corner, behind which was, indeed, a bed. It was unexpectedly beautiful, an antique mahogany sleigh bed with intricate carvings on the posts, clearly magical woodwork and probably at least two hundred years old. “One of the few things I insisted on keeping, from the Manor,” Draco said. “You wouldn’t believe what a pain in the arse it was to get it here.”

“I would,” Neville tried to say, but a yawn fought its way past, and he wound up sitting down abruptly as Draco knelt to unlace his shoes. Everything felt deeply surreal, not least the blonde head bent at his knees. Draco looked up to say something but held still, seeing something on Neville’s face. He reached out and stroked a strand of Draco’s hair back behind his ear, wonderingly. “I can’t, I don’t want anything to happen.”

Draco laughed a little, but it wasn’t unkind. “Your virtue is safe with me.”

“Why are you being so nice?”

“Come on, Longbottom. You’re a disaster,” was all Draco said in reply, and stood up to unbutton Neville’s shirt. Neville let him ease it off, but when Draco tried to take his t-shirt off over his head, he reached for Draco’s hands at his waist and held them still, until he understood. Then Draco was pulling back the sheets and they were lying down, and sweet Merlin this mattress was amazing. No wonder Draco had wanted to keep it. Neville’s eyes closed in involuntary relief. He felt Draco twisting to pull off his own shirt, and then there was a subtle quiet dance of limbs as Draco’s leg went between both of his, and Draco settled down between his arm and his chest, one of his arms thrown across Neville. Draco’s skin was warm and smooth against his, wherever their arms brushed against each other, and without thinking much about it, Neville tightened his arms around Draco to pull him close. They fit together seamlessly, Draco’s head nestled in the hollow of his shoulder, and Neville pressed a soft kiss to the top of his hair. Dear gods, had he ever been more comfortable in his entire sodding life?  
  
“_Nox_,” whispered Draco, and then the only light came from the sodium streetlamps outside, muted and orange. “Now go to bloody sleep.”  
  
“Already am,” said Neville; and he was.

•

The sky grew bright, and Draco got up to draw the curtains; Neville made a blurry sound of protest at his warmth deserting the bed, but then something feathery poofed out over him, and Draco said “Don’t you dare get up,” so he didn’t. He curled into the warm spot Draco had left and fell back asleep to the sound of shower water running, and Draco singing in what sounded like French, something about not wanting to work. He woke again briefly to the sounds of shaving, the razor tapping against the sink basin, but rolled over and passed out once more.

The next time he woke, Draco was putting a cup of tea on a saucer on the nightstand, and Neville groaned and sat up, disoriented, with his t-shirt half-twisted around him. Draco was fully dressed in a button-up shirt and black necktie and an embroidered waistcoat, hanging open, with plum-coloured velvet lapels.

“I’m due at work,” Draco said. “There’s more milk, if you want more. I put some already.”

“It’s perfect,” said Neville, after taking a grateful swallow. “What time is it?”

“Half-eight,” said Draco.

“I was asleep—”

“For ten hours, yes, and could probably do the same again this weekend. Would it kill you to look after yourself a bit?” Draco bent and kissed him quickly on the cheek. “Look, don’t worry about tidying up or anything, just—I’ve got to go.”

“I’ll—”

“—owl, of course,” and whatever there had been between them in the night seemed gone now, or anyway turned brisk and ordinary. But Draco smiled at him and it was back, something that sparked a bit, like a charm, that rippled between them and shimmered in an inexplicable way, one for which Neville had no words; and then Draco Apparated and Neville was alone in an empty Kensington flat, with stacks of books and a full cup of tea, trying to wrap his brain around the fact that he’d just spent the night in Draco’s bed, and was half-dressed and drinking tea out of a bone china cup with the Malfoy crest gilded on it, and was strangely blankly happy.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For the fragrance-forward, Draco is wearing [Jo Malone’s Vetiver & Golden Vanilla](https://www.jomalone.com/vetiver-golden-vanilla-cologne-intense), because I am obsessed with it, and Luna’s hundreds of little bottles are the wizarding equivalent of the [Demeter fragrance library](https://demeterfragrance.com/most-popular.html), so Neville’s probably wearing some blend of Wet Garden and Dirt; no I am not taking questions at this time.


	3. Chapter 3

He could no longer put off Hermione, he told himself, as he made his way home slowly, like a Muggle; he walked from Draco’s flat to Marble Arch and then took the Central line all the way to Hackney, and walked again. He needed the time to think, to collect the pieces of himself, which felt frayed somehow, and scattered, like they were lying behind him along his pathway, bits of tattered rags he would have to pick up and reassemble into something like his old self, before he had to face Hermione’s fully justified inquisition. He had no idea what to say to her, still dressed as he was in yesterday’s clothes. He had held Draco Malfoy in his arms all night, and slept, for once, like the dead. It was raining a little, just enough to make him even moodier, and the pale yellow leaves of the plane trees, with their softly peeling bark, didn’t lift his spirits particularly. Draco was right: he should probably get more sleep. He should eat a vegetable once in a while, and get out walking more. He should cut back on his pints. He should go see his parents.

He walked right up to the shop, keys already in hand, without even noticing Harry standing there. They blinked at each other in the drizzle, Harry with a hand lifted to protect his glasses.

“Come on in, then,” Neville said. He unshackled the padlock, and raised the grating to the studio. _L & L INK, LLC_ the window said, in Luna’s elegant dark italics, over a frosted white background. She’d written it out with quill, and then spellcast it onto the window in the middle of the night, so no Muggles would see words magically appearing on plate glass.

Harry followed him inside, shaking water off his jacket. “Mione sent me,” he said, a little apologetically.

“S’alright,” said Neville, then waved him back for a cup of tea. The studio had an electric kettle, but Neville heated the water wandlessly, then dropped in an ordinary black teabag, PG-13 or Typhoon or whatever it was Muggles drank. He added milk, handed the cup to Harry, and they sat down on one of the battered sofas in the break room. It was one of Luna’s finds, a dark green three-cushion affair she’d discovered near the skip out back, and they’d Levitated it inside and cleaned it up, but it was still missing most of one arm and several buttons. “She told you.”

“Yeah,” said Harry. He came out of his jacket and draped it over the sofa arm that was still extant, then picked up his tea again, blowing on it a little. “She’s just. Worried and all that.”

“I know.”

“Not that you can’t. You know. Look after yourself, of course.”

“I know.”

Harry studied him for a moment, and Neville hoped there weren’t bite marks or anything. “Is that where you were—Malfoy’s?”

There wasn’t any point lying about it; Neville nodded, eyes averted, and drank his tea.

Harry cleared his throat. “Look, Nev, I don’t want to—I mean, it doesn’t matter. You know that, right?”

“Doesn’t it?” Neville said, finally. He set his mug down. “It’s Malfoy. He—he _tortured_ you, and Hermione, _and_ me; his family were—”

“That was bloody ages ago,” said Harry mildly. “He also threw me his wand, when it mattered.”

“And then buggered off with the rest of the lot—”

“—and came back to testify against them before the Wizengamot,” Harry finished. “After which Lucius _killed_ himself, in Azkaban, and his mum went completely round the bend, and virtually everything the Malfoys ever had has been impounded. I reckon he’s been punished enough.”

For a moment Neville felt confused. Why was _he_ arguing against Malfoy, and Harry arguing _for_ him? The memory of Draco straddling his hips came back to him unbidden, with a wash of heat, and he dropped his face into his hands. Harry patted him clumsily once, then twice, on the shoulder, and Neville almost jumped at the contact.

“I’m not saying you should move in with the bloke,” Harry went on, exactly as if Neville weren’t sitting there sweating at the sensation of Draco curling his fingers into Neville’s hair and kissing his way along Neville’s throat. “Or, I mean, do that, if you want. But you’re—we’re both, er, you know. Gryffindors. We’re practically guaranteed to act first and think later. If at all.”

“You mean—‘I swear to Merlin, Ronald, it’s like you’re duty bound to throw yourself off a cliff’?” Neville said, imitating Hermione, and Harry shook his head, wry.

“Something like that. So just, maybe, I dunno, having a think first this time might not be such a bad idea.”

“Oh I’m thinking alright,” said Neville grimly. “I’m thinking I’ll bollocks it all up somehow. For starters—” and just then Luna drifted downstairs, braids already in place, wearing a long indigo dress and brown lace-up boots, a look she called _forest mori_. Neville wasn’t completely sure what a mori was, only that he’d never seen one in any forest, to the best of his knowledge.

“Hello,” she said, and stood there gazing at them artlessly, hands wrapped around her own cup of tea. No one could look at you like Luna Lovegood, as though all your layers were being peeled away, but you didn’t mind, somehow. “Don’t be worried, Harry.”

“He’s not,” said Neville, and stood up to pull his jumper over his head, still feeling flushed. “I am, though, a bit.”

“You got some sleep,” was all Luna said to that.

“Some,” he admitted.

“That’s good, because you have your first client at—” she consulted the clipboard hanging on the wall—“ten a.m.”

“I’m off then,” said Harry. Luna took his mug and gave him a solemn kiss on the cheek, which he returned. “Neville, come have a fly-around with me and Ron on Sunday? Ginny’s got us in at the Harpies’ practice pitch—it’s brilliant.”

“Yeah, alright,” he agreed, brightening. “Half-five?”

“That’ll work,” said Harry, shrugging back into his jacket. “And, you know. What I said.” Neville nodded and they hugged, a little carefully.  
  
“Tell Hermione to Floo me, if she wants,” Luna said. “I know Draco better than any of you.”

That was probably true, but Neville was already thinking about the morning’s work—correcting a badly done watercolour on a customer’s shoulder blade from its ugly plain American Tribal style to something that more actually resembled, well, a watercolour. He could use Disappearing Ink for most of it, especially around the edges, and then redo the pigments from his fresh supply of George’s Rainwater Hues. The design was a rabbit leaping over a little pond, with cattails and rushes, and the moon reflected in the water. It would be tempting to make drifting clouds shift over the landscape, or pinpoints of mist sparkling in the background, but he’d already decided he would keep magic to a bare minimum, just enough to enchant the eyes of the viewer into thinking there was movement when there actually was none. Harry left with a nod and Neville ran a hand through his hair to sort it out, rolled up his sleeves and settled into his work, soothed by the ritual of checking inks, opening the autoclave and unwrapping all of his sterilized supplies, laying everything out in order, neatening and straightening his station, copying and resizing the art for the day, and, contrary to what he’d just told Harry, not thinking about Draco Malfoy for even a minute.

•

He’d left Draco’s flat that morning in a bit of a hurry, though, not wanting Draco to feel he’d been snooping around or looking at anything—and in fact, he caught himself staring vacantly at the rows of book titles, wondering what had happened to the rest of the Malfoy library, which surely had been extensive, before he came to himself with a jolt, and threw on the rest of his clothes to go. Thanks to his panic, he’d managed to leave without his vape pen, which he only realised around noon when he had time for a break and went up to the roof, but had nothing to smoke except a packet of stale cigarettes, placed just out of the weather on a ledge outside his and Luna’s tiny greenhouse, made mostly out of old windows that Neville had hammered together on a frame of lumber reclaimed from the ground floor, when they’d knocked out most of the walls.

“Well, that’s not on,” he said aloud, peering down into the packet; but Draco was in Hogsmeade all day, and anyway Neville didn’t think he had a mobile. Maybe he had electric mail? He had a laptop, after all. He could ask Luna to send a message. She stuck her head out of the greenhouse just then, swathed in scarves in different shades of grey, a spray of hibiscus in one hand.

“Do these look yellow to you?” she asked him. The flowers were bright red.

“Not much, no,” he said.

“Oh, good, I was afraid my eyes were going. What’s wrong?”

“Left my vape at Malfoy’s,” he said, patting his trouser pocket for it automatically, as if it might materialize. “Bit far to Accio the thing.”

Fortunately, Luna didn’t subject him to lectures on his taking up smoking since the divorce, and anyway, she was no stranger to mixing cannabis oil with some diviner’s sage and partaking herself, though she preferred a water bong and the new moon. “That’s a shame. But it means you’ll see him again. You probably did it on purpose.”

Neville had just taken the first drag off a crumpled Dunhill and burst out coughing. _“What?”_

“You know, like leaving your spectacles at your therapist’s office.” Neville had never had a therapist, which Luna knew perfectly well, nor, as far as he knew, had she. Also neither of them wore glasses.

“Go, I don’t know. Root something,” he said, waving smoke away, still coughing. Luna disappeared back inside the greenhouse; he could hear her singing. He sat down on a milk crate to catch his breath, waiting for his life to suddenly make sense again.

By the time he’d finished the cigarette, that hadn’t happened, but he had decided to owl Malfoy. He hadn’t slept with anyone, in the sense of, asleep in a bed, since Hannah, and yet he’d passed out all night long with Draco in his arms, only waking when Draco murmured and turned them on their sides, lips brushing a kiss against the bare skin of Neville’s shoulder and then slotting his knees into the insides of Neville’s, his shins against Neville’s calves, pressed up behind him so closely Neville could feel every inhalation, every exhale. That had to be worth something, that he trusted Draco, even unconsciously, not to hurt him. That couldn’t mean _nothing._

He still had half an hour before his next client, so he went down to the flat to see about waking Cleopatra Philopator, Luna’s pygmy owlet, who was dozing with her head under one wing. “Awfully sorry,” he murmured, but offered her some of the crispy green treats Luna kept in a bag nearby. Cleo nipped them up gratefully, and even inclined her head toward Neville for caresses and for him to scratch behind her ears, which were tufty and, if he were honest, a little silly-looking. He kept scratching, absently, as he stared down at the parchment and tried to make sentences that sounded calm and casual, when he still felt anything but.

> _Hi Draco, as it happens I left my vape at your place. It’s sort of a_—he hesitated—_Muggle cigarette machine. Don’t worry, it won’t hurt anything, but do you mind if I come by Dervish and Banges tomorrow to pick it up? Thanks for—_he stopped again; thanks for what?—_letting me sleep. xx Neville_

Cleo stuck one foot out obligingly as he fastened the note with a bit of leather, stretched her wings, and flew through the open window, off above the chimney tops and into the clouds, as Neville stood there watching her until he could see her no longer.

•

Draco owled back that night, saying he’d found the vape pen in the sofa cushions and would drop it off at the studio on his way home from work next day, which had the result of making Neville pace around the front area that evening, compulsively straightening the paintings (large bold acrylic abstractions of Nargles, Luna’s; delicate filigree botanical pen-and-ink with watercolour, his) and trying to make the cushions look less deliberate and more casually arranged on the three shabby sofas marking off the customer area, on the other side of the counter.

“What are you doing,” Luna finally asked, perched over the receipts on a stool, as Neville swapped out a framed California poppy for a water lotus and lily pad, with long trailing roots.

“No idea,” said Neville, and ran his hands through his hair.

“You need a shave.”

Neville always needed a shave, so he just nodded.

“Why don’t you take him for a picnic,” Luna said, quill hovering in mid-air. There weren’t any customers and she didn’t care for Muggle pens.

“Rotten weather,” said Neville. _And, it’s Malfoy_, he didn’t say, which didn’t need saying. Imagine eating tuna sandwiches with a Death Eater, it was preposterous—

“Hullo,” said a voice behind him, and Neville turned to see Draco stepping through the door, in black robes and his Dervish and Banges waistcoat, collar open and tie loose but still knotted. He hugged Luna, then quirked an eyebrow at Neville. “Had dinner?”

“He usually doesn’t,” Luna piped in, clipping switch card receipts together with a Stapling charm and putting them in the drawer under the till.

“And I’m shocked to hear it,” said Draco. “I suppose fasting and prayer, among other forms of bodily mortification, are in the Longbottom code of ethics. Nonetheless, I thought he might make an exception, given the excellence of the company,” he added dryly. “There’s an Indian place down the street that the Gilded Cauldron recommends.” Neville must have looked blank, because Draco went on, “Drusilla Phlogiston? The Daily Prophet restaurant critic? Anyway, we could get takeaway if you want to stay here. I don’t mind. Also, here’s your Muggle drug wand thing.”

Luna seemed to have made herself scarce and Neville felt a wash of gratitude, because Draco was suddenly standing very near, to hand him the vape pen, and all Neville could really think about was touching him, reaching out to pull him close and bury his face in the warm curve where shoulder met neck, where he could feel Draco’s hair against his mouth. Instead he swallowed, nodded, and fetched his second-best robes off the coat rack in the back of the shop; he was shrugging them on, just in case, when he came back to the waiting area and saw Draco staring at one of the paintings as if utterly transfixed.

“What?” said Neville.

Draco’s mouth opened and closed again. He shook his head. “Nothing, I just—that’s quite something.” It was a small painting Neville had done a long time ago, propped up by the till in a little gilt frame, of a blue wyvern in silhouette, flying upward, or maybe seen from above; the wings were tattered and ragged, but the shape was sleek and elegant. Neville thought of the little creature as a survivor of something, but had never interrogated the image beyond that.

“Is it?”

Draco looked at him then, the sharp sidelong one that reminded Neville of Hogwarts. “What, you want me to flatter you, Longbottom? Buy me dinner first and then we’ll see.”

Neville held the door open for him anyway.

•

They came back with brown paper bags, warm and fragrant with samosas, peshwari naan, mattar paneer, gobi aloo. Neville found himself clutching his bag close, maybe partly to keep from touching Draco in the street. When they came back inside, Neville locked the door and swung the sign around to read “CLOSED.”

“Is there anywhere civilized to dine, or must we lie on these couches like Romans?”

“We’ve a break room,” said Neville; and then, before he could stop himself, he leaned forward and kissed Draco gratefully on the temple, feeling silky strands of hair beneath his lips. He couldn’t be imagining the faint flush that stained his throat going down into the collar of his shirt.

Luna was apparently upstairs having her own tea, but even without her help, they made quick work of the food. Renewing his commitment to eating more vegetables, Neville single-handedly demolished most of the gobi aloo and, only a little embarrassed, all of the bhindi bhaji. Draco had also insisted on getting a very large mango lassi in a waxed paper cup, and Neville poured this into two teacups for them to share afterward, appreciating its cool sweetness after the pungency of chili and cumin, ginger and garlic. They lapsed into the happy silence of sated diners; Draco dragged a stray piece of papadum through a drizzle of mint chutney and sighed, apparently contented.

Neville curled his fingers into his palms. It was so easy, too easy, to sit quietly with Draco, and now he had a new problem: he wanted to lick the taste of mango from Draco’s mouth, flushed and pink and appealingly curved, now, in a knowing smile.

“It’s always so gratifying to feed a Gryffindor,” Draco said, with a complacency Neville would once have found extremely irritating. “You all eat like it’s the last opportunity you’ll ever have to do so, and there’s none of this plebeian bother about leftovers.”

“How did a Malfoy become a fan of curry?” Neville asked, hesitant but more than a little curious.

Draco laughed, but it wasn’t the cutting one. “Strange as it sounds, it was comfort food for Lucius and me, whenever Narcissa was on a tear and the house elves were hiding. He’d tell me to stay quiet, and he’d Apparate out and come back with something mild, butter chicken or chickpea korma, and we’d eat together, holed up in the sitting room, out of cartons. It still makes me a bit homesick for the Manor.” Neville had so many questions, but he didn’t know yet which ones he was allowed to ask.

Draco sighed and put one hand out, palm down, on the table. Neville wasn’t sure if he was meant to take it, so he waited.

But then Draco looked up, straight at him, face suddenly serious, and with a familiar plunging of his heart into his stomach, Neville thought, resigned: _Well, this is it_. He looked down at his cup, at the pale dregs of lassi, at his other hand in his lap. What had he been thinking: Malfoy was surely just toying with him, of course; of _course_ he was, why had Neville even let himself for a moment imagine that someone as elegant and cruel as Draco would want someone like him, after all those years of torture? Somehow he’d been expecting it, even if he hadn’t thought it would happen after Draco had brought him spectacular takeaway, it was inevitable, it was—

“Neville?” said Draco, and Neville twitched. “I was hoping we could talk about something.”

It was almost word-for-word what Hannah had said, that night, when the two of them had come home so late from the Cauldron, both strung-out and exhausted from interacting with strangers all day, or at least that’s what Neville had thought was wrong, until Hannah started talking. He nodded, and closed his eyes. Best to get it over with quickly.

“Two things, really,” Draco went on, his voice oddly uncertain. “And the first—you can say no. I mean, you should feel free to refuse. You probably should do, it’s ridiculous, really, and I know better, it’s just that you’re, well, so _perfect,_ and I don’t even deserve—”

“Malfoy,” Neville interrupted, feeling like his voice was scraped out of him, eyes still closed. “Get on with it.”

There was a shocked silence. “I beg your pardon,” said Draco, affronted. “Get on with _what,_ I’m _trying_ to ask you a _favor,_ the least you could do would be to hear me out—this isn’t _easy_ for me, you know.”

Neville felt Draco take his hand. He opened his eyes.

“You mean you’re not—I thought you were—?”

Draco tilted his head. Then all at once, understanding gleamed in his eyes.

“Oh for—_Mordred’s sake,_ you thought I was going to _break things off with you.”_ Neville shifted, looked away again. “Over _dinner?_ What sort of _barbarian_ do you take me for, I cannot begin to—you know what, don’t answer that.” He didn’t let go of his grip on Neville’s hand, but his voice softened a little. “Please don’t tell me someone else ditched you over bloody takeaway.”

Neville swallowed. “Something like that.”

Draco stared at him. “Well, let me assure you that she—and I trust I’ve got the correct pronoun, here—that she was, if I may say so, barking mad, a blithering _idiot, _and also very likely a trollop.”

“No,” Neville said. “No, she was just unhappy.”

“Fucking Gryffindors_. _You think every single thing is your fault, you just have to bear the weight of everyone else’s sodding bad choices on your shoulders. And—don’t get me wrong, they’re lovely shoulders. Manly, broad, strong, _lovely_ shoulders,” he finished, lasciviously. In spite of himself, Neville smiled.

“So you’re not—”

“—breaking up with you? Merlin H. Christ, Longbottom, I haven’t even _started_ with you. You have no _idea._” He leaned over the table abruptly, making it wobble, and planted a slightly sticky, lassi-scented kiss on Neville’s mouth. It lasted a little longer than either of them perhaps intended. Neville somehow kept his hands to himself and didn’t do what he wanted, which was to maul Draco in the sudden, knee-weakening wash of relief.

“Perhaps I’d better skip to the second thing,” said Draco, sitting back down, “which was going to be a disgraceful admission. That I, er. Well.” Now he was definitely blushing. “That I might have had something of a—a crush on you. Not just at school, but certainly then, and for, for—for several years, actually. And now. For quite a while, now.”

“A crush,” said Neville, blankly, gobsmacked.

“Rather,” said Draco, and he looked downright uncomfortable. “I used to watch you in the _greenhouse_, it was desperate—I couldn’t let anyone know, they would have shown me no mercy.”

Neville found his voice. “But we, we were all sure you had a crush on _Harry.”_

“You thought I had a crush on _whom?”_

“On, er, Potter?”

Draco looked livid. “You—_what?!_ For Merlin’s sake, _why?!”_

“You talked about him constantly! You practically never gave him a moment’s peace, you were—”

“That’s because Potter is an annoying _prat,_ I should have thought that would be _obvious—_”

"—always on about him, we were sure you were madly in love.”

“Oh for—don’t you know, it’s always the one you never talk to?”

“It was _me.”_ Neville swallowed.

“Yes, that’s what I said.”

“A crush on _me.”_

“Oh for—yes, alright! A crush, a pash, look I _fancied_ you desperately, fine, there’s no need to be a giant _tit_ about it—” but now Neville was done keeping his hands to himself, and murmured _Digestivo_, which made him feel briefly as though he were being bathed in very refreshing fizzy mineral water; and then they were both standing up, and kissing, and Neville had half-shoved the table out of the way and backed Draco up against the wall and had both hands cupped around Draco’s face and was snogging him desperately, like Draco was the one thing standing between him and sanity. Draco’s mouth was yielding yet fierce and this time, unlike the time in Draco’s flat, they were in rhythm, taking and giving and then taking more, and more. Neville yanked up his Draco’s shirt and skated his fingertips over the soft skin of Draco’s belly, warm and trembling under his touch, and Draco moaned into his mouth, and his hips hitched up against Neville’s, helplessly. Neville managed to stop himself just as his fingers reached for Draco’s fly.

“Wait—what was the first thing?”

Draco opened his eyes and dropped his head back against the wall with a thunk; he looked gratifyingly ruined, hair mussed, eyes shining, mouth red. “Yes. That. Well. I wondered—I wondered if you thought you might be able to remove the Dark Mark.”

•

After they made out some more, and Draco had finally pulled away and tucked his shirt back in, both of them short of breath, Neville ran shaky hands through his hair and went upstairs for Luna, because he wanted her help. She was sitting in the velvet wing-back chair they’d stolen from the Ravenclaw common room, eating from a plate of spaghetti bolognese with a pair of chopsticks. Demetria was watching this process from the chair arm with apparent interest.

“Professor Lovegood,” said Neville. He was quite sure Luna would someday teach Divination, just as he hoped he would be a Herbology professor, someday in the future when they would both have gotten over their aversion to Hogwarts.

“Professor Longbottom,” Luna said. “This spaghetti’s not as good as yours.”

“Well, you need fresh basil. But listen—when you’re done, can you come down for a bit? I need—that is, Draco needs—” he fell silent, defeated for a moment, then blurted out, “It’s the Dark Mark. We’re wondering if I can remove it, but we need your help to see what’s involved.”

“No one can remove the Dark Mark,” said Luna, as calmly as if she were telling him they were out of loo roll.

“Yeah, I know.” Neville took a deep breath. “Will you help, though?”

“Of course,” said Luna. “I expect it’s got some nasty spellwork bound up in it.”

“Draco thinks so, too.” Neville didn’t want to admit how likely he thought that was. “Luna,” he said. “How do you—you and Hermione, how did you forgive Malfoy?”

Luna’s eyes were sky-blue in the candlelight, cloudless as a morning and, Neville thought, just as ageless. When she was ninety, she might finally look thirty. “When a child makes a mistake, how do you forgive it?”

Neville thought of Lily, and Baby Fred, and had no answer.

“You don’t,” Luna continued, “because they’ve done nothing wrong. They don’t need forgiveness.”

“But,” Neville said, then stopped again, struggling for words. He still remembered the savagery with which Malfoy had called her _Loony_, and the other, worse, names he and Crabbe and Goyle had called all of them. The Malfoys had locked her in their _dungeons,_ for Merlin's sake. He still remembered, and always would, watching Draco, utterly unharmed, cross the rubble of the courtyard to stand by his traitorous parents’ side after a night soaked in blood, an anguished morning when every muscle of Neville’s body ached and his palms were torn and his throat was raw, and his mouth tasted of smoke and metal and grief.

“But what?” said Luna, simply. “He was a child, Neville. You were too—and Harry, and the others. We were children, and they pulled us into their war. There’s nothing to forgive.”

“Okay,” said Neville, unconvinced.

“Just think about it,” Luna said, “and keep your mind open.”

“Okay,” he said again.

“Why can’t I just Accio basil leaves from the greenhouse; it would be so much nicer.”

“Because they’re alive, I’ve told you.” Feeling a sudden fondness for his flatmate, he crossed the room and kissed her on the top of her head. “Take your time, we’re—talking.”

“You smell like turmeric,” said Luna, but she leaned against him for a moment, and Neville felt oddly comforted.

•

Downstairs, Luna unwound one of her long shawls, a blue so dark it was almost black, and shook it out over the break-room table; she then gently shifted Draco’s arm to the top of it, and rummaged among her supplies until she found two tapered candles, one silver and one gold, which she set to either side of him. Draco raised an eyebrow as Luna laid out, in a precise five-pointed pattern, half a dozen smoky quartz crystals, placing the last one in the palm of Draco’s hand, and closing his fingers over it. She had her own meticulous Ravenclaw way of doing things, and if she wanted crystals, then Neville was well sure she had a good reason.

She also brought out a bundle of clary sage, and sprayed one of her atomisers, so the room was filled with the scent of something bright and citrusy. He knew enough to stay out of her way at this point, but he murmured _Lumos_ to light the candles and sage, and then _Nox_ to turn out the overhead lights, as she pulled out her wand. Draco swallowed, and rolled up his sleeve.

Neville had never seen the Mark up close, and he wasn’t ready for the visceral horror of seeing that ink or brand or whatever the fuck it was, carved into Draco’s white skin. It wasn’t black, but dark red, and angry-looking, like a burn. An involuntary shock ran through his body, galvanic, tightening his hands and straightening his spine automatically; just the shape of the thing made him want, for the first time in a long time, the solid heft of a wand in his duelling hand. He forced himself to take one deep breath, and then another, and to study the thing with something like detachment. In addition to being evil, it was also just thick, ugly, solid linework that with Muggle laser treatments would take more than a half-dozen sessions to remove, if it even could be done, and it would still not quite ever be gone. Neville could do better.

“This will definitely hurt,” Luna told Draco, “but not much, and it’s the only way to see.” He nodded, visibly steeling himself, and she began to trace the Mark’s pattern with the tip of her wand, head bent almost to the surface of the table, so that she was looking at it sideways. Neville wasn’t quite sure what she was looking for, but he thought she’d probably found it when Draco went rigid and made a small wordless sound of pain. He stepped forward and took Draco’s other hand, mentally berating himself for not doing it sooner; Draco’s fingers entwined with his gratefully and gripped, hard. A thin dark column of something like smoke followed the line of Luna’s wand, pulled along by whatever spell she was murmuring under her breath. It sounded like Egyptian, or maybe Arabic. She seemed vague and even uninterested, non-committal, but Luna was at her most vivid and precise at such times, Neville knew from long experience. He waited, as Draco went white around the mouth and nose, and his hand gripped Neville’s more tightly.

“Balls,” Luna said, finally, and straightened. Draco exhaled slowly through his nostrils, and Neville wanted to hold him. Luna lowered her wand. “We need Hermione.”

“Really?” said Neville. “I mean, yes, absolutely; but why? Voldemort’s dead, the Mark shouldn’t be—I don’t know, whatever—activated, or still tied to him—”

“The Dark Mark isn’t _about_ Voldemort,” said Draco, and Luna nodded. She put one hand on his shoulder and squeezed sympathetically. “He activates it, yes, but it’s about the person who gave you the brand. They’re the one who initiated you, the one to whom you’re—_I’m_—still bound.”

“Then who? Lucius? Your _father_ did that to you?” asked Neville. “But he’s—”

“No.” There was a pause. Draco rolled down his sleeve, and looked sick. It was Luna who finally spoke.

“It was Narcissa.”


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Posting chapter 4 a bit early, just because we could all use the distraction. Stay safe and _stay at home_, darlings!

Hermione unshouldered her book bag; it was full to the edge and brimming over, as if she were still a schoolgirl and her NEWTs were just around the corner. “What?”

“Nothing, I—just, that’s rather a lot of books.” Neville wondered why she hadn’t used magic to haul that lot. Hadn’t Hermione used to have some massive charmed sack that held, like, tents and wardrobes and entire families of Weasleys? Maybe it was full of baby things, now. Her hair had several new green and blonde streaks, and was pinned back from her face by tiny braids. Neville also wondered, not for the first time, what her parents thought about her transformation, once she’d brought them back from Brisbane and De-obliviated them.

“You brought them!” said Draco, from the doorway, and to Neville’s surprise he caught Hermione up in a hug, which she returned with enthusiasm. Clearly everyone had stopped being aggro about Malfoy except him, without his noticing, and he still felt a bit stupid about it.

“Well, it’s not every day one of the Sacred Twenty-Eight evinces such an interest in Critical Mudblood Theory,” Hermione said, and started offloading books, as Draco leaned in with interest to examine each title. “You’ve got to start with the Beauxbatons School—Chrétien de Pizan, and Marie-Laure Hébert, she’s excellent, and the Bête Noire Collective, they’re so important…then _Mudbloods Rise Up_! by Judith Shacklebolt, who’s obviously a pureblood, but she’s a really great ally…and I think you’ll really love this edited collection: _The Critical Mudblood Reader_. It’s got several essays in it that changed _everything_ for me, especially Cynthia Mildred Yowell—oh, and an essay by Denzel Graves! who was also one of the first Mudblood Theorists to write about being queer.”

“Brilliant,” said Draco. “I don’t know how I can ever repay you,” which was so utterly unlike anything any of them had ever heard him say, possibly including him, that they all stood there in silence for a beat, as if to honor the moment.

“Right,” said Hermione, taking off her coat. “Let’s have a look at it, then.”

•

“If this isn’t like old times,” drawled Draco. “A pack of Gryffindors all staring at me as if I were some kind of insect.”

“Shut it, Malfoy,” said Hermione, but without any real heat, at the same time as Luna objected, “Ravenclaw here.” Now that Neville knew him just the smallest bit better, he could tell Draco was deeply rattled; he always kept the Mark hidden, and Neville could only imagine what it felt like to have it on display.

Hermione straightened up with a frustrated exhalation. “What I don’t understand is why it’s still red.” Draco pushed down his sleeve and sat back, crossing his arms defensively over his chest. “It should be faded to white, like the other Death Eaters’ marks—like Harry’s scar. Voldemort’s dead, so the Marks aren’t used for him to summon anymore.” She turned to her bag and began hauling out still more books, including a mouldy-looking one Neville thought would prove to be the most help: _Magickal Marks & Their Unbynding & Removall, _by a Mr Thaddeus Rigel Black. The cover, which was, obviously, jet-black, had a wicked-looking goat’s head pentagram graven into the leather; the goat had fangs, and a creepy grin that flickered in and out, and Neville tried not to think about what such a mark would even be meant to do in the first place.

Luna all but pounced on the book, ran a finger down the table of contents, and then flipped to a section near the middle, with a half-page header in Gothic lettering reading “DARKE YNITIATIONS: & HOWE THEY (MAYE) BE UNDONNE (MAYHAPS) (& SHOULDE YOU CHUSE TO UNDERTAKE SUCH).” There was a complicated-looking alchemical chart in faded colours, because of course there was; because Potions was always Neville’s worst subject.

“Black was Potions Master at Hogwarts, yonks ago,” said Hermione. “That book was among Snape’s old things, when McGonagall cleared out his set. I thought it looked promising.”

“Let’s have a look, then,” said Neville, steeling himself for archaic units of measurement and incomprehensible planetary symbols. Draco stood up and moved across the room, leaning too casually against one wall, but Neville could feel him watching closely, which was a new, unsettling, fluttering sensation, now that he knew about Draco’s crush. He fought not to like it as much as he did, and to focus on what he was reading. “What the devil is _Congelation_—it sounds like something to do with pudding. Hermione, how much does a scruple weigh, again?”

“A third of a dram,” said Hermione. “The thing is, the Dark Mark is really a variant of the Protean Charm, so what we have to do first of all is convince it that none of the other incarnations are still around, or are connected to it. Separate it from the pack, as it were.”

“Right,” said Neville, though he couldn’t think how they were meant to do that any more definitely than Voldemort’s death would have done.

“That should take the colour from it, at least. Then we might be able to—”

“Draco,” said Luna, not taking her eyes from the page. “Does Mrs Malfoy talk?”

Neville didn’t look around, but he could feel even with his back turned that Draco’s face was tight, that closed-down, shut-out look he got. Finally he answered. “No. That is, she—no. Not really. Not to other people.” He paused, and it seemed to take another moment before he could go on. “She talks to Lucius, sometimes.”

There was a long and dreadful silence, during which Neville thought: _I never would have imagined I could pity Draco Malfoy as much as I pity the rest of us._ Luna was right; Draco had done nothing to deserve this. Neville wasn’t sure why they weren’t both alcoholics, or addicts, or insane themselves. He couldn’t imagine having had a doting mother your entire life, even if Narcissa was high-strung and cross with the house elves or whatever, only to lose both parents completely, after they’d turned you into an enemy asset on the wrong side of a losing war.

“So we’ll have to do this without her,” said Hermione. “I think we still can. But Draco, I’m not sure…perhaps we should be at St Mungo’s, with Healers standing by. It could get—”

“Not on your blooming life,” said Draco, and then he pushed off the wall and came up to stand by Neville. “I got this at home, and I’ll have it taken off the same way. Sedate me, bind me, hell, _Transfigure_ me if you think it’ll help. But if anyone can handle this, it’s you three.”

•

After protracted consultation of Mr Black, and another painful examination of the Mark, Hermione and Luna decided that they could try the spell in four days, at first sign of the waxing crescent moon (something astrological about when you were supposed to weed potatoes; Neville privately had his doubts, but took their word for it). Draco agreed to take the day off from Dervish and Banges, and the day after as well, just in case. Neville didn’t say anything, but even though it would be a Saturday, he was resolved to close up the shop if Draco needed anything. He wasn’t sending him back to Kensington to cope alone; he’d made that mistake, more than once, with Hannah, and never again. As much as he kept telling himself they’d only been on two dates, not counting Mrs Weasley’s birthday piss-up, it didn’t matter. Whatever happened during the Mark’s removal, Neville was going to be there for him afterward.

“Ye gods, Longbottom,” Draco said, eyeing him warily, when they went up to the rooftop for a smoke. “Never would have picked you for a fussbudget.”

Neville took a drag of one of Draco’s very excellent cigarettes (with a gilded Malfoy crest stamped on it, from a silver cigarette case, same) and squinted at the smoke until it took on the shape of a sort of blobby, uneven niffler, and then dissipated. “That’s probably the nicest thing you’ve ever called me.”

“Don’t let it go to your head,” said Draco. They stood there for a moment in that eerily companionable silence that Neville had only ever had with Luna and Harry. Draco leaned against the chimney, one foot propped on the brick, sleeves still rolled up. Neville couldn’t say he was getting used to the sight of the Dark Mark, but he no longer felt a jolt of adrenaline every time he saw it.

Neville stubbed out his cigarette in the broken flower pot there for that purpose. “Have you thought about what you might like, instead?”

“Instead of what?”

He gestured with his hand toward Draco’s arm. “Instead of that.”

“What do you mean, _instead?_ Instead of my arm? Use language, you gorgeous lout.”

Neville felt himself flush. “I could, I mean, if you wanted. Give you something else.”

Draco flicked ash off the end of his cigarette, and looked up at Neville through his eyelashes. “Well, I certainly hope you’ll give me something else. But that doesn’t seem to be what we’re talking about just at this moment, now does it?”

“A tattoo,” Neville clarified. He wasn’t really thinking as he spoke, just a vague sense that maybe, if there were any traces of the Mark left, Draco might want something new there, something he’d chosen for himself. “I could make it beautiful.”

Draco looked at him, expression unreadable. “Beautiful.”

Neville dusted his palms off on his trousers, then nodded at Draco, reaching for his arm at the same time. Draco peeled off the brick where he was leaning and came toward him so easily, like he’d been waiting to be touched; it made Neville’s mouth go a little dry. Neville traced the Mark with one fingertip, and Draco held very still.

“If anything is left, we could cover it. Maybe a Slytherin serpent? Or that blue wyvern you liked.” He drew the shape of the little dragonet, where its wings would flare out and its tail would curl. Something that would be Draco’s, and not—theirs.

Draco dropped his cigarette and crushed it with the toe of his shoe, then reached up and placed his hand on the side of Neville’s face. “Yes, absolutely,” he said. “Not those. Something else. But yes.”

“I have another idea,” Neville started to say, but it got lost in the press of their kiss.

•

They walked back down hand-in-hand; Hermione had left for the Ministry, and Luna had gone to run errands (including Neal’s Yard, because she liked the sheep’s milk cheese, and the goat’s milk soap, which she melted back down and mixed with her own ingredients). This time, instead of taking Draco all the way back down to the studio, Neville stopped them on the landing of the stairs, and asked, “Do you have a minute?”

“No,” said Draco, “I’m horribly pressed for time, which is why I’m standing here like a pillock holding your hand and allowing you to make that earnest face at me.”

“Come here, then,” said Neville, who was already learning to speak Draco, and opened the door to his and Luna’s flat.

He’d lived there just over four years, but they almost never had anyone over who wasn’t Harry, Hermione, or Ron, so it was strange to see it through someone else’s eyes. His own aesthetic was more accurately reflected in the tattoo studio’s layout: simple, austere even, so that he could focus on the work and not his surroundings; but the apartment was very much his and Luna’s together, and always had been, so she had nested, and made it uniquely theirs. The largest room was a combination of living room and kitchen, with a long plain pine table separating the two sides; in the center of it were dozens of jars and bottles, filled with herbs and, in some cases, pasta and cat food. Each wall was a different bright colour; Luna had herself painted them, the north wall robin’s egg blue, the west one periwinkle, the south something between salmon and dark peach, and the east one pale yellow, all of which had something to do with auras or chakras or Neville could never remember what. There were multiple sofas, in various states of wear and conditions of use, and everywhere you looked were hand-thrown glazed mugs, glasses of water for the cat, saucers with nibbled biscuits, houseplants, dried herbs, rag rugs, crocheted afghans, stacks of books, tumbled crystals, tarot cards in mid-spread, and quills still half-heartedly writing recipes and spells in their owners’ absences. Demetria was curled up in the middle of Luna’s favourite chair on a green silk pillow, eyes slitted, looking very much like it was her apartment and she graciously permitted Neville and Luna to stay there sometimes.

Draco, for his part, looked like he wanted to say something snarky, but apparently even he could find nothing to mock. He stood uncertainly by the entrance, reaching out, tentative, to touch the lacy, spiderwebbed edge of one of Luna’s Irish linen cloths, thrown over the table by the door where they kept keys and pocket change and notes to each other on a pin-up board. “So this is what happens when witches set up housekeeping together,” he settled on, eventually.

“Come here,” Neville said again, and they went into his room.

At first it had been a blank space, dreary and dim, reflecting his recently broken heart and his utter inability to decorate in any way not involving the Gryffindor common room or the Holyhead Harpies; so for the first couple of years it had stayed as austere and utilitarian as a soldier’s or prisoner’s bunk. Then, somewhere around the end of year two, Luna had given him a tin of purple paint; he couldn’t even remember why, something to do with matching a colour for a client, maybe. He’d found himself unable to sleep one night after particularly bad nightmares and had wound up putting newspaper on the floor and painting the plain wooden head and foot of his bed, and then one wall. Then somehow things had come together without his even trying: Hermione cleared out her linen closets and donated an impossibly soft feather duvet, stuffed with fwooper-down; not long after, Neville found a set of sheets he wanted in a market stall, midnight-blue Egyptian cotton with constellations on them. Luna showed him how to weave round rugs with strips of wool in faded colours, using a quick _Bræiden_ charm her father had taught her, and over the course of many other sleepless nights, he made several to soften the hardwood floor.

The walls were bare of art, but he preferred them that way. Over the bed and on the ceiling, he’d affixed Muggle glow-in-the-dark stars, but given them each individual tiny permanent _Lumos_ spells, so that they shone without his needing to put the light on first (and because he had time, and possibly because he was a sad bastard, he’d taken a pencil and string and plotted carefully, describing a circle for the northern hemisphere, and making sure each star’s magnitude was more or less accurately represented). Still later, he’d come across a battered cherrywood table in the back of the store, underneath a truly mysterious quantity of cardboard file boxes holding exactly nothing, and Levitated it upstairs, stripping it down and rubbing it with almond oil until it glowed; his sketchbooks and journals were lined up along the top, with jars to hold his pens and pencils. Finally, Luna had a knack for pulling strings of fairy lights out of other people’s bins and somehow making them work again, so the window out to the fire escape was encircled by the steady warm glow of multicoloured lights.

Neville started rifling through his most recent sketchbooks, looking for something. Draco wandered over to the window and was examining Neville’s houseplants with suspicious attention, fingers moving among the succulents and ferns. Neville didn’t know if this counted as their third date, or if it were still the third date by which you were supposed to have sex, but somehow he knew it wasn’t right yet, and he wanted to listen to that voice, the one he hadn’t paid enough attention to in the past. He found what he was looking for, and turned to show Draco.

It was a drawing he’d done in ink and then added watercolours to, later: a serpentining constellation, glittering with George’s special pigment. The stars were picked out in silver, with violet clouds behind them, and the whole thing moved a little, as if a breeze were blowing. Draco reached out and took the book from him, and they stood looking down at it together.

“It’s Draco,” Neville said, unnecessarily.

“It’s perfect,” said Draco. “Did you know my parents argued about my given name throughout my entire childhood? Lucius said it was a Black family name, not a Malfoy one. He was right, of course; but that was rather Narcissa’s point.”

“Do you really like it?”

Draco once again was clearly about to say something catty, so Neville stopped him by tilting his chin up with one hand and kissing him, slow and deliberate.

“Stay here with me, after—after we do it,” he said, voice hoarse, resting his forehead against Draco’s; and Draco apparently knew what he meant, because he swallowed, and nodded.

•

When they came out, Luna was back in her room with the door closed, and Demetria was washing herself in a window sill, where she’d knocked over her catnip plant. She let Draco scratch behind her ears, and then, having decided he was acceptable, flung herself at his feet and rolled around in what Neville thought was a fairly shameless way, though he wasn’t one to talk.

Draco petted her some more, then said he needed to be going; they promised to owl each other before Friday, and Draco Apparated for work, robes in a swirl around his knees.

Back down in the studio, Neville couldn’t concentrate on anything. He rearranged all his ink by colour, washed the windows with a surreptitious Scourgify, smoked another cigarette out front, then decided to mop the entire studio by hand before the next customer came in. The work helped, was just dull and repetitive enough to settle his mind. Things with Malfoy were, frankly, frightening, in a way he hadn’t felt in a very long time. The kisses were verging on dangerously sweet, now, and lingering, and made something in Neville’s chest swell up and ache. There didn’t seem to be quite enough air, when Draco was close to him. He wasn’t ready for this, he knew that; it was happening to him too soon, but it was happening anyway, and he didn’t know if it could be stopped, or even slowed down. He didn’t know what it meant. And he didn’t know where to put his feelings, or why they felt so outsized, as if something were growing inside him and was going to come scratching and clawing its way out, whether he were ready or weren’t.

Fortunately, a client came in just as he finished, someone who’d visited before and chatted with him, and had taken a business card for later. Today seemed to be later; her dog had recently died, and she wanted a remembrance, as people often did with their pets or loved ones. Neville spent half-an-hour sketching a detailed butterfly's wings, and then inked them in as lightly as possible, pale gold and bronze and spring green, until it shimmered on her thigh. She thanked him and left; and then an older man wanted a blue Celtic knot, for his late mother; and what with one small request and another the day passed. It was after eleven when he closed up, took out the trash, and disinfected his station.

He stripped methodically and got into the shower, turning the water up uncomfortably hot. There were days his job felt extraordinarily pointless, he thought, going over his hands a third time with one of Luna’s barley-and-honey soap bars; days when he suspected he should be doing what everyone else seemed to think he should do, working as an Auror or at Hogwarts: Neville the brave Gryffindor, Neville the war hero. But the truth was he wanted little or nothing to do with the Ministry, who were, as far as he was concerned, almost as much to blame for what had happened as Voldemort—if they hadn’t been so eager to let a bunch of schoolchildren fight their battles for them, none of it would have unfolded the way it did. He could always go back to Hogwarts to teach there later, when the mere sight of the old stone bridge leading up to its parapets didn’t make his mouth fill with metallic saliva and his legs feel shaky. If all he did for now was to tattoo a small bunch of forget-me-nots onto a girl’s ankle (with the name of her sister underneath, lost to the Death Eaters)—well, that was more than enough for him.

He stood there under the spray for a minute, staring down absently at the thick white cicatrice of his knee scar. Even hidden as it was under his clothing, the sight of it would be a reminder for the rest of his life. He thought again about the blood-red ugliness of the Mark.

If he could make anything for Draco that would be less traumatic, when he glimpsed it, than that, maybe even something comforting—a lodestar, magnetic north; a reminder for when he was lost in the dark, of who he was and what really mattered, and how to get there again—then for once, Neville was content to offer what little he had to give.

•

It was one of the worst nightmares he’d had in a long time: he and Bill had to carry Snape’s body down to the noise and chaos and stench of the Great Hall, with the others, and just as they laid him down next to Fred, he sat up again and started complaining about how they’d done it, waving his one remaining arm and shouting at them in a strange voice. When Neville turned to flee, he saw Draco's parents bent over a dark shape on the floor, both Malfoys weeping, Narcissa holding someone’s hand. 

Her strangled sobbing was in his ears when he woke, and he lay still for a long time in the half-dim of the fairy lights, trying to get his bearings. The glow-in-the-dark stars blinked at him quietly, and gradually he knew where he was, and when, and forced his rigid muscles to lengthen and relax against the sheets. Less disoriented, he realised his face and hair were wet with sweat, and his t-shirt was almost soaked through. He grimaced, got up to find a dry one, and staggered toward the lav, pulling off his shirt as he went and dropping it onto the floor.

At the sink, he splashed cold water on his neck and chest, and looked at his face in the mirror, heavily shadowed with beard, circles under his eyes. He knew from long experience with nightmares both that it was after five a.m., and that he wouldn’t be able to go back to sleep. He’d never seen a single dead body before that night, and then he’d seens dozens, and he thought of them all, laid on in rows, one after the other, their faces and names and lives; and then he had to let the basin fill with cold water, and put his face in, to stop the panic rising in his throat.

With a clean shirt on and wet hair combed back, he padded into the kitchen to make a cup of tea. It turned out to be well after five, almost six, so instead of chamomile he made gyokuro and stood there while the water came to a simmer as Demetria wound around his ankles and tried to convince him it was time for her breakfast. He settled into Luna’s wingback chair and read about fifteen pages of Thaddeus Rigel Black before giving it up as a lost cause; there was a whole chapter about birthmarks and third nipples, which he supposed wizards in Matthew Hopkins’s time were well rid-of, but no modern witch would want bits of her anatomy removed. 

He drank his gyokuro slowly; it was grassy and rich, like broth, and had some almost magical effect of being calming but also heartening and strengthening at the same time. He wondered if Draco drank tea after his nightmares, and if they were anywhere as bad as his, if they involved maybe being held down by Lucius, while Narcissa, while she—he couldn’t even imagine it: that tall, elegant, reserved, preternaturally calm woman, patrician as a marble statue, setting a white-hot metal brand to the flesh of her only son. She’d lied for him, Harry had told them, later; lied to Voldemort’s face and said that Harry was dead, on the fragile strength of his reassurance that Draco was still alive. She obviously loved Draco more than life. No wonder she was in St Mungo’s with his parents.

In the end he drew a quick sketch of Demetria and Cleo curled up together dozing and left it by the teapot, with a note for Luna saying he’d gone for a walk.

His walk, as it turned out, was to Diagon Alley.

•

The shops were just opening when he got there; he stepped quickly past George’s, so as not to have to see him so soon after his dream. The Daily Prophet offices were already busy, while Obscurus Books and Flourish & Blotts were just raising their shutters and sweeping the front pavement. Neville wound up at Dervish and Banges just in time to see Draco step into one of the windows, releasing handfuls of autumn leaves into little eddies and whirls around the ankles of the mannequins (which Neville had always found distressingly realistic, especially when they moved, and which had once made him cry as a very small child, a fact which he would give a good deal for Draco never to learn).

Draco was using his wand to charm some picturesque drifts of mist when he caught sight of Neville, and they stood there looking at one another a moment in silence, Neville’s fists balled up in his jacket pockets. He wondered just how dire Draco found his own lack of fashion sensibilities. Currently he was wearing jeans and trainers, one of Molly’s less successful jumpers, and an old Gryffindor scarf that had seen better days and might have even belonged to Arthur.

Draco lowered his wand, nodded once, sharply, and vanished from the window. Neville wasn’t sure whether this meant he should go inside, or what; Dervish and Banges had six floors filled with everything from magical appliances to children’s toys, furniture and clothing and the latest in wizarding accessories, and he wasn’t sure if he should meet Draco out back, or where out back even was. But he was saved from such considerations by Draco’s stepping through the self-revolving brass-gilded doors and coming straight up to him, seizing both Neville’s elbows in his hands and peering up into his face, frowning and looking annoyed.

“What are you doing here, you look ghastly, I missed you,” Draco said, all in a rush, and Neville had to fight not to shove him up against the flawless, freshly sparkling surface of D&B’s plate glass and kiss him senseless then and there.

“Couldn’t sleep,” said Neville, thought it was almost nine, and normal people had been awake for hours anyway. The street was still mostly empty, though, so he did kiss him then anyway, just a little, because he could.

“Snogging in the streetfront for all to see, how marvelously tasteful,” said Draco, but he kissed him back. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” said Neville, which was so patently untrue he had to close his eyes for a second, and then kiss Draco once more, helplessly, and properly this time. He tasted of something smoky, lapsang souchong maybe, and it was hard to let him go and take a step away.

“Give me five minutes,” said Draco. “I’ll be right back.”

“It’s not an emergency,” said Neville, feeling foolish.

“Of course it is,” said Draco. “If nothing else that sweater is truly regrettable, you clearly require my aid. Five minutes,” he said again, with a quick press of his lips to Neville’s cheek; but he was back in two, robes done up all the way and a dark grey scarf wound around his neck.

Parvati had, it transpired, also started a tea shop next door; they were just opening, unrolling the awnings and putting a sandwich sign out on the pavement, with little bluebirds fluttering and winding ribbons around it. Draco half-dragged him inside and they sat down at a small table by the window.

“Two Moroccan Sidecars,” said Draco to the young house elf who appeared at his elbow. She was wearing a pair of bright green coveralls and a little pink hat. “Double brandy, heavy on the date syrup, heavy on the tangerine juice, heavy on the cream. And a plate of shortbread,” he added, apparently as an afterthought. She nodded and disappeared with a small cracking sound that made Neville twitch despite himself.

“What did you just order?” said Neville, who never had anything stronger than butterbeer before six.

“You look like you need something more than tea,” said Draco, “and Merlin knows I do, I’ve got a ten-hour day and it’s the week before Samhain, everyone wants made-to-order ghosts. Now what the fuck happened to you, you look like you’ve seen one. A ghost, that is.”

Neville shook his head. “I told you, it’s nothing. Just a bad dream.”

Draco studied him. “So I was right—they’re terrible. Do you have them much?”

Neville shook his head again. “Not like before, anyway. Only when I’m—” _under stress, _he didn’t say. To his surprise, what he did say next was, “Did she really do it?”

“Hold up,” said Draco, lifting a hand to stop him, as the house elf returned with their drinks. He thanked her and then put back a good third of his sidecar in one long swallow, hand still held aloft, and finally lowered his glass, licking cream from his upper lip, and sighed deeply. “This has been bothering you, I take it.”

“She’s your _mother,”_ said Neville hotly, “how could she _do that to you—”_

“To save her life,” Draco said.

This brought Neville up short. “What? How—”

“I know it’s hard to imagine,” said Draco, “but try. Voldemort had been at the Manor all summer, using it as his base of operations. We couldn’t leave a room without running face-first into a fucking Death Eater. The staff were terrified—I was terrified, my _parents_ were terrified. He wanted Narcissa to take the Mark, and I thought that if she did, she’d be killed when the Dark Lord lost. She offered anyway; and Bellatrix was all for it. I couldn’t let her.”

Neville took a long drink of his sidecar, which was sweet and tart but also burned going down. Draco had been right, though; the brandy settled him. He thought again of Lily, and James, and Baby Fred, and how he could probably chop off the head of anyone who even thought about hurting them. “I’m sorry. I’m trying to understand. But it doesn’t make sense.”

Draco laughed, the brittle high-pitched one Neville hated. “That’s because it’s absolute bollocks. But one of us had to do it, and then Voldemort decided that because I was going back to Hogwarts, I could kill Dumbledore, to make it easier to get to Harry, so it was two birds with one stone. Anyway, it was over fast,” he said, after a pause. “It didn’t even hurt that much,” and now he was just lying. Even if Narcissa had used magic, a brand was a brand. Neville knew a few things about skin and injury, about endorphins and pain receptors. It would have happened so quickly, there wouldn’t have been time for any endorphins to kick in. It would have been total, searing, obliterating agony, the kind that would wipe out your ability to think or move or even breathe, or do anything but scream.

“Tattoos aren’t that way,” he said, mostly to get the images out of his head. (Narcissa dripping with silent, horrified tears; Lucius holding his own son down, face turned away, features anguished.) “It won’t hurt like that.”_ (I won’t let it.)_

“I expect not,” Draco said, after a moment. “Otherwise Muggles wouldn’t get so many of them.” He finished his sidecar and ran a thoughtful finger round the rim, collecting powdered ginger and foam, then leaned back in his chair. “Neville—listen to me. Even if Hermione and Luna can’t get the Mark off, you’ll do a beautiful job covering it. I know you will. I _trust_ you. Could you please not, I don’t know—let this make you barmy? A word I’m not exactly delighted to use, given our family histories; and yet.”

“Of course,” said Neville, and drained the last of his drink. “I told you, it was just a dream.”

“You did,” Draco said. “And yet.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Let's all have Moroccan Sidecars. I have no idea how to make one.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you, lovelies, for reading! I'm sorry it's not longer but glad to have had your company these last few difficult weeks. Hang in there, okay? And please stay safe. <3

Friday came, and it turned out the hardest part of the whole business was keeping Harry and Ron away. They both argued they should be there, as if the Dark Mark were going to spring forth a troll, and their services might be required to subdue it. Hermione said irritably she wished she’d never told Ronald at all, and in the end they were only spared the presence of the two Aurors by the fact that the Chudley Cannons were playing in the quarterfinals that night.

Neville had been nervous all day, even though Draco’s owl Bellerophon had brought him a paper bag that morning, with an almond croissant and a bit of parchment reading, “I can hear you worrying from here, would you fucking _stop it, _I’m _fine. _See you in a bit—DLM.” The problem was that Hermione had seen fit, for whatever reason, to tell Neville privately that more than one Death Eater in Azkaban had wound up cutting off their own skin, to try to get rid of the Mark, even though after Voldemort’s death the rest of them had all faded from red to white. So the Marks _were_ somehow still connected, or anyway Draco’s was connected to something; and trying to break its correspondence to whatever it was, without Narcissa’s being there to redact her initial spell—it wasn’t shaping up to be easy, or, most likely, possible at all.

Just the same, they set up everything for the ritual in the middle of the flat, with the sofas pushed back and the rugs dragged out of the way. Hermione drew a sigil on the hardwood with a smudged stick of charcoal, and Luna had been all day grinding herbs and semiprecious stones into submission. Draco, for his part, announced that he would be napping in Neville’s room if anyone needed him, and they left him to it, while Neville spent most of the afternoon going up and down between the studio and the flat, and in the meantime wrote out Thaddeus Rigel Black’s incantation in Latin, translated it into English, and then memorized it.

“Where’s your wand?” Hermione asked. She was looking over his shoulder at the parchment, as he made vague gestures in the air, and she sounded more than a little puzzled. Neville could hear, very loudly and clearly, Luna conspicuously not saying anything.

He didn’t actually know where his wand was; in his room somewhere, obviously, but the truth was he hadn’t used it for a very long time, and while he hadn’t hidden that fact, he hadn’t exactly advertised it either. But this was—Hermione should probably know.

“Don’t be mad,” was how he started.

“Okay,” she said, clearly used to this opening argument from Ron.

“I just don’t really use it anymore.” He pushed the parchment away. “It’s not—I don’t know how to explain it.”

“Try,” she said, hands on hips in a way he hadn’t seen since Hogwarts.

He gave up pretending. “I don’t need it.”

She stared at him. “Longbottom, what do you mean ‘I don’t need it’?”

“I just—don’t? Maybe I got used to working with a wonky one, because my first one was my father’s, not mine, and even though I went ahead and got another one for school, I only really used it so no one would think I was—you know.” _Any weirder than you all already did._

Hermione was staring at him thunderstruck, and she clearly wasn’t going away, so Neville took a deep breath and shoved up his right sleeve. “Okay. Fine. Here.”

“I don’t see anything,” Hermione said, after a long moment.

“I know,” Neville said. “It’s an invisible tattoo. Cherry and unicorn hair; thirteen inches.”

Her mouth fell open. When she could speak again, she said, “Are you fucking joking.”

Luna finally came over and stood at Neville’s side, radiating quiet support. “No.”

“Nev, this changes everything. How long have you had this?”

“Since the Battle. I didn’t want my wand anymore.” _I couldn’t stand to see it, _he thought, _because every time it was in my hand, all I could think about were Tonks and Remus and Fred, and all the bodies opened and broken and emptied out, the blood, the snapped necks, the pale skin—_

“Is it…did you actually pulverize a wand? Doesn’t your skin just reject it?”

“Not if you do it right.” It didn’t take much; a matter of molecules, more than an entire wand.

“This could change everything we know about magic. Did you know there’s a shortage since Ollivander?” she demanded. “Students have to pay twenty times what we did, to get a wand at all. Did you know that?”

He shifted in his seat, and put his sleeve back down again. “I suppose. I mean—yes.”

“He doesn’t think it would work for everyone,” piped in Luna.

Hermione shook her head, and several expressions fought their way across her face, settling into a kind of thunderstruck resignation. “One of the most powerful wizards of our age, living with a flatmate in the East End and using his abilities to run a _magical tattoo parlor._”

“We also have a kitten,” Luna added.

“What kinds of spells can you do?”

Neville shrugged. “Whatever. Just basic things.”

“Show me.”

“We’ve too much to be getting on with,” Luna said, firmly. “He can show you tonight.”

“That’s what she said,” came Draco’s voice from the doorway, and Neville couldn’t help it, he laughed.

“Is it a Muggle joke?” asked Luna.

“Something like that,” said Hermione, rolling her eyes. “But we’re not done with this. I know you’re terminally convinced of your own uselessness, Neville, but think how this could help other people—what about Deaf wizards, or mute ones? Maybe it won’t work for everyone, but we’re bloody well talking about this later. Malfoy, come give me a hand with these counter-spells.”

Draco was fully dressed in his most formal robes, the sort Severus Snape always wore, yards of light-drinking soft black fabric buttoned up all the way to the throat and reaching nearly to his ankles. He’d left his hair loose and it fell down around his face.

Neville looked out the window. It was nearly sundown; they might as well get started. “You’ll have to strip,” he said to Draco, apologetically.

Draco responded as if Neville had said he should set himself on fire, or the way Demetria did when you accidentally trod on her tail. “I most certainly will not!” he said, indignant. “It’s my arm we’re working on, not my _arse!”_

“Do you mean to tell me,” said Neville, “that a bunch of purebloods did Dark Magic without being skyclad? Strip.”

“Not bloody likely,” said Draco, chin lifted mutinously.

“But the ritual,” Neville began.

“I don’t care _how_ medieval it is, the _ritual_ does _not_ necessitate I get my _kit_ off in front of Granger and Lovegood! And I’m certainly not going to parade around naked in front of _you.”_

“They haven’t had sex yet,” said Luna, sagely. “I think that’s beautiful.”

“I feel ill,” said Hermione. “Can we please stop talking about this? No one is getting their kit off.”

In the end, like all High Magic rituals, this one was hours of set-up beforehand and then, almost shockingly, over in twenty minutes. They dimmed all the lights and lit candles; Luna put Demetria and Cleo in her room, and then set her herbs alight over five charcoal braziers, one at each corner of the pentacle. They gave off a bitter wild smell, a feeling that drew you up out of yourself, made you want to surrender or yield, give up something you didn’t know you had.

Neville cast the circle himself, precise and cautious, not leaving a centimeter open, and then did the quarter calls. He faced each of Luna’s pastel walls in turn to invoke the Guardians of the Four Directions—Black Mother, Water Maker, Shining Flame, Star Finder—and then above, below, and the center. The room was utterly silent yet filled with presence when he finished. The three of them stood facing Draco, Luna and Hermione each with a hand on one of Neville’s shoulders, wands drawn. He had Draco kneel, arm extended, and said the first part of Black’s incantation in Latin, just because he’d read it that way so many times, then shifted into English:

> _First with three drops of oil I do remove  
_ _All evil influence, and I humbly pray,  
_ _O beautiful Diana, unto Thee  
_ _That Thou wilt take it all away from me,  
_ _And send it to my worst enemy._
> 
> _When the evil fortune is taken from me,  
_ _I'll cast it out to the middle of the street:  
_ _And if Thou wilt grant me this favour,  
_ _Every bell in my house shall merrily ring;  
_ _Then well contented I will go forth to roam._
> 
> _And Thou shalt call for me the fiends from hell;  
_ _Thou shalt send them as companions of the sun,  
_ _And all the fire infernal of itself  
_ _Those fiends shall bring, and bring with it the power  
_ _Unto the sun to make this red wine boil—_

On the third pass through the incantation, Neville knelt, too, and began to trace the red raised outline of the Mark with his fingers, feeling as he did so the strangest pulling sensation, as if he could have lifted entire boulders without the slightest effort. He moved away from the Mark a little, and kept chanting; Draco gasped and gripped his elbow with his other hand, holding his arm down, because the Mark was peeling itself away from the skin, dragged up into the air by something Neville couldn’t describe. It looked like a cloud of blood floating in water, hanging there in mid-air, as he chanted harder, and concentrated all his attention on the tugging feeling, the feeling that he had a hook into the Mark and was reeling it out of the surf like a thrashing fish. As if from a great distance, he felt Hermione and Luna’s hands tight on his shoulders, and could see their wands out of the corners of his eyes, faint golden sparks sputtering in the dim of the room.

He finished the incantation, never taking his eyes from the red haze curling in the air:

> _I drink, and yet it is not wine I drink,  
_ _I drink the blood of sacred Diana,  
_ _Since from wine it has changed into Her blood,  
_ _And spread itself through all growing vines—  
_ _Thou who art Queen of the sun, and of the moon,_
> 
> _And of the stars—here I call to Thee!  
_ _With what power I have I conjure Thee_  
_To grant to me the favour I implore!  
_ _If this grace I gain from Thee, give a sign, I pray, to me!  
_ _As Thy will, mine—so mote it be._

As always, the room was filled with wind, curtains stirring though every window was closed, the candles having guttered out and been knocked down, parchment and tufts of cat hair and owl feathers swirling and flapping around on the floor. Behind him he could hear Hermione struggling for breath. And then suddenly, as he said the last four words, there was a terrifically loud _crack_, as if someone were Apparating; the red cloud vanished into thin air; and then everything fell preternaturally still.

Hermione was the first to speak. “Draco?” she said. She stepped around Neville, knelt down next to both of them, and took Draco’s hand. “Are you all right?”

He blinked at her, swaying a little. They all looked down at Draco’s arm, which was now flawless, the skin as white and smooth as if nothing had ever been there.

“Fuck,” he said, and crumpled to the floor.

•

He was fine, he was _perfectly fine_, Draco kept protesting; Neville could put him down, there was _absolutely nothing wrong with him_, which he demonstrated by sitting up on the sofa, swinging his feet to the floor and promptly passing out again. Luna brought them some rose brandy and a fresh cup of hot pink tea with extra honey, and then she and Hermione said they were going down the street for crèpes, and promised to bring back one each of Nutella and marron glacé for them. Neville didn’t blame them; this kind of magic always did leave you shaky from low blood sugar and desperately craving carbs. He hoped to get some calories into Draco, once he was fully conscious again. Right now his face was visibly pale against the sofa cushions.

Neville busied himself clearing up so he wouldn’t stare. When Draco finally stirred and opened his eyes, Neville hurried to the side of the sofa. He brushed Draco’s hair back from his cheek, and searched his eyes for any sign of pain.

“Where is this place? Who am I?” said Draco, and then ruined it by laughing.

“Not nearly as funny as you think you are,” said Neville, and wiped his forehead and cheeks with the cloth Luna had given him, dipped in orange water. “Drink this.”

Draco made a face but took a sip of the brandy, and then another.

“Did it hurt?” Neville had to ask.

“No, I feel amazing.” Draco said. “Except—for some reason I can’t stop shivering?” He held out his hand, which was indeed all but vibrating. Neville touched his face; his whole body was shaking, like a drum being beaten from the inside out, and his skin felt freezing cold to the touch.

“All right, up you go.”

Draco’s previous objections to nudity seemed forgotten; at least, he meekly let Neville spell all his buttons undone, push his robes from his shoulders, and lead him into Luna’s bathroom, leaning on Neville in t-shirt and boxers, still trembling uncontrollably.

“This isn’t exactly how I planned for this to go,” said Draco ruefully, sitting on the closed toilet lid and shaking so hard he could barely stay upright.

“It’s all right,” said Neville, and meant it. “We have time.” (He partly credited the success of his flatmate situation to the fact that he and Luna had separate lavs, because Luna’s capacity to take hours-long tub baths could not be overestimated.) He ran the water as hot as he dared, and added his own tincture, that he used on days his neck was threatening to go out: mostly rosemary and lemon balm, with some calendula and eucalyptus. He stripped off his own clothes, then turned to ease Draco’s shirt off over his head, and slip off his pants. “Come on, in you go.”

“Fuck, I knew you’d be lovely,” said Draco, voice unsteady.

“Come on,” Neville said again, gently steering him toward the tub. He turned off the water and helped Draco climb in, then carefully slid in behind him, knees on either side of his hips, so he could pull Draco back against his chest and get his arms around him. Draco was shivering so violently it made the surface of the water ripple.

“I’m sorry,” Draco bit out, jaw clenched.

“Shh,” said Neville. He wrung out the flannel and put it at the base of Draco’s throat, kissing his shoulder blade just because it was there. He tried not to stare, but he was only human, and he had wanted him for weeks, maybe years; Draco was compact but well-formed, softly furred with golden hair, and Neville wanted to map every inch of skin with his mouth.

“It worked, though,” said Draco, looking at his arm again. “I still can’t believe it. You did it.”

“Of course we did,” said Neville, though Merlin knows he’d had his doubts right up until the last instant. There were too many unanswered questions, but he wasn’t about to start asking them.

“Then there’s you with the wandless magic. We haven’t talked about that, not really.”

“And we’re not going to.” Neville wet the flannel again with hot water and wrapped it around the arm in question, making Draco hiss quietly through his teeth in mingled discomfort and pleasure. Neville wondered what other sounds he could make, and ran the washcloth low across Draco’s flat stomach.

“Oh god,” Draco said faintly, and turned his face to the side, into Neville’s shoulder. His trembling had almost stopped, and they were kissing, but it wasn’t like the recent kisses—this one wasn’t sweet or tender at all; it was demanding, it was Draco needing something, and Neville being more than willing to give it, finally.

They broke for air and Draco gasped, “How much longer do we have to engage in this absurd post-ritual ritual, because I’m not cold anymore, and I’m—”

Neville dropped the flannel and lowered his hand to Draco’s cock, which was flushed, and gorgeous, and curved to fit into his palm perfectly. He kissed the side of his neck, then bit down.

“Neville,” said Draco, already sounding wrecked. “What are you doing?”

“Should have thought that’d be obvious.”

Draco’s back arched as he tried to move his hips into Neville’s hand, and water sloshed dangerously toward the rim of the tub.

“This isn’t what I, oh fuck,” he said again, as Neville tightened his grip. “We’re going to get water all over the floor. This is a disaster. We should do this properly.”

“What are you saying,” Neville said, increasingly pleased with himself. “Are you saying you want me to take you to my bed and fuck you stupid? Because I’ll do it.”

Draco made an unclassifiable high-pitched sound. “That. Do that.”

So Neville did.

•

“I want to touch you everywhere, I want to taste all of you,” he was a little shocked to hear himself saying as he manhandled Draco onto the bed, licking droplets of water from his collar bones, pressing the sheets aside to nestle him down. Shoulders, chest, hips, thighs, fingers, knees. All that skin, soft and warm and water-sweet from the bath. “Will you let me?”

“Will I _let_—would you just—”

“That wasn’t yes,” Neville informed him, and plundered his mouth to give Draco time to think about it. He wanted not just consent, but enthusiastic consent, and he was content to wait for it, to slot himself between Draco’s legs and slide against all that warmth, feeling how perfectly they notched together, Draco’s cock hard and sleek alongside his, the desperate way Draco’s hands fluttered around before finally settling on Neville’s lower back, fingers digging in.

(Also post-High Magic sex was probably the best sex you could have; Neville wasn’t an idiot.)

“Fine, _yes, _this is me saying yes,” Draco said, cranky, but he also sounded like a little he was about to cry, so Neville thrust again for a few strokes just for the goodness of it, then reached down and took Draco’s cock snugly in his hand to keep it company while he was busy elsewhere. Draco made an appealing high-pitched moan and Neville smiled against the skin of his neck, then started to lick and suck his way down.

“Are you sensitive here,” he asked, and turned his attention to Draco’s left nipple, not really caring about the answer, instead watching the color of the skin darken from pale pink to dusky rose, feeling the way Draco’s shoulders shifted against the mattress, listening to the strangled quality of his breathing when Neville nibbled a little. “I think you are. I think you like it, I think you like me touching you there.”

“For fuck’s sake,” gasped Draco, and lifted his head off the pillow. “Are you always so goddamn _chatty?”_

“No,” said Neville, and didn’t add that Hannah used to complain about his silence. “I like you.”

“I like you too,” Draco said, hips moving against the sheets, “but I was promised fucking.”

“You don’t have anywhere else to be,” said Neville, and mouthed along the line running from Draco’s navel to his breastbone. “You’re right here in my bed, where I want you. Let me. I want to make you feel good.”

“You want—okay,” said Draco, but he sounded more broken than petulant, and he gasped again when Neville lowered his head to nose at the crease running between thigh and groin and then licked, dragging his tongue up to the sensitive curve just below Draco’s waist. He worried one hipbone with his teeth, tasting the skin to feel Draco’s hands come up, helpless, to his hair, and fasten there.

“Fuck, do that,” said Neville, going a bit hoarse himself, and he reached up and closed a fist around Draco’s, to make his fingers tighten until it hurt a little. “Hold onto me.”

“You’re—_god, _unexpectedly good at this,” said Draco, and curled up from the bed to kiss him, tugging backward on Neville’s hair until they shifted and he wound up mostly in Neville’s lap, legs wrapped around his waist, and then Neville’s arms went around him, and they kissed until Neville felt his lips start to grow numb. Draco’s skin was satiny and warm, and having all of him in Neville’s arms, pressed up against his chest, was almost too good to bear.

He dragged his mouth away reluctantly to say, “I was married, I’m not a virgin,” then lowered himself backward, pulling Draco down on top of him. This was good too, Draco straddling him, hands still fisted in Neville’s hair: more kissing, the scent of Draco’s breath intoxicating. Neville thrust up, a little blind from how good it felt, cock against cock, but still wanting to take Draco apart, disassemble him down into all of his pieces, see what was left over when there was nothing but sensation and movement and wordless grasping.

“Wait,” he said, because he was suddenly about to come. “_Arresto.”_

“Fucking _wandless_ _magic,_ you have no idea how hot that is, _Neville—”_

Neville kissed him again to shut him up before pulling Draco down into him, hard, so hard that Draco stiffened at first and but then yielded and went with it, legs falling between his, skin silken, their limbs entwined and Draco moving against him, shuddering helplessly, the tip of Draco's prick wet against his bare stomach, and everything so perfect Neville had to close his eyes and just hold on to Draco’s hips. Maybe taking Draco apart could wait after all. Maybe he had time. Maybe they had time. Maybe—oh _fuck—_

•

Much later that night, Neville went downstairs wearing only sweatpants and made an additional sign for the front door, a square of paper reading “CLOSED ALL DAY SATURDAY – FAMILY EMERGENCY.” On his way back up, he made a stack of toast in the kitchen, buttered each slice heavily and messily, and snagged a pot of marmalade with a spoon stuck in and two mugs, hooking open the bedroom door with his foot and closing it neatly behind him. Draco sat upright in Neville’s bed, and looked very much, as far as Neville was concerned, like he belonged there.

“Your sheets are gay,” he informed Neville, who thought briefly about withholding the toast. “They have little stars on them.”

“So will you, after tomorrow,” Neville retorted.

“Well we _knew_ I was gay,” said Draco, “but you, you’re quite the dark horse, aren’t you?”

“Me?” said Neville. “You’re one to talk, _you’re_ the one who was always swanning around with Pansy Parkinson, and Astoria Greenleaf, and—”

“Mere appearances,” said Draco, and waved a hand dismissively. “Mother’s idea.”

He hadn’t called her _Narcissa_, Neville noticed, but said nothing. “Eat this,” he said, shoving the plate of toast at Draco, and switched on the electric kettle sitting on his desk. “You need carbs.” Hermione had texted to say they were going to meet up with Ginny and having a hen’s night, which was her idea of being hilarious, so unfortunately crèpe delivery was out.

“Marmalade is my second-favorite,” Draco announced, but Neville noticed that he nonetheless put a very large amount on his toast. Neville raised an eyebrow, waiting.

“Lemon curd,” said Draco, swallowing his bite and dusting off both palms. “You must learn these things. My favorite color is grey, my favourite number is nine, my favourite animal is the fox. My favourite pizza combination is quattro stagione, my favourite wireless programme is _Starfalcon_, and my new favourite thing to do is—”

Neville very shortly found out what it was.

•

He woke around ten in the morning to find Draco quite gone, robes and wand and whole self, and felt ridiculously bereft—or at least he told himself he was being ridiculous. He lay there for a long time, more or less pouting, until he got up to look for a note or to see if Bellerophon were at the window. Outside the day was unusually clear and blue, and the sun was shining. Neville had intended to give Draco his new tattoo; but maybe Draco had made other plans?

While Neville stood there toying with his tea and trying to decide what to do, Luna came upstairs. She was wearing dark blue stockings and a faded black skirt that hung about her ankles in artful tatters.

“Draco told me to tell you he had an errand,” she told him. “He didn’t want to wake you. You have two hickeys on the left side of your neck.”

“Yes, thank you,” he told her, and took too large a swallow of tea, in embarrassment.

“You know, I don’t think I like sex,” she went on, in a conversational tone, and Neville felt—not at all surprised, just relieved that they were finally about to talk about it.

“That’s okay,” he said, and meant it. “It’s—that’s really good, to know that. About yourself. We all love you exactly the way you are, Luna. Thank you for telling me. I wouldn’t change a thing about you.”

“I know,” said Luna. “I used to think I might wind up with Harry, or maybe with you; but I won’t, will I? I’m happy as things are.”

“Unlike Mione and Ginny,” Neville said; and then could have bitten his own tongue off.

“They’ll figure it out,” said Luna serenely. “They kept kissing last night, anyway. I think they could run away to the moon before Ron or Harry even noticed. If you’re going to see your mother today, would you take this?” She held up a bar of soap in a little bag of mesh netting.

“Of course I can—but, hang on. Luna, why do you think I’m going to St Mungo’s?”

“It says FAMILY EMERGENCY, on the door,” she explained, faintly puzzled; and then Neville had to put down his tea, and wrap his arms around her, and kiss the top of her head, and explain to her what real family really meant, these days, to him; to all of them.

•

He waited another hour, but Draco never returned; and obviously, now he did have to go to St. Mungo’s. He hadn’t been in so long it was shameful, and he needn’t stay all day. He got dressed, shaved, Apparated there, and walked into the Disorders of the Mind unit, only to take half a step through the door of the sunroom and stop in his tracks, frozen in shock.

Alice Longbottom was there, along with Narcissa Black Malfoy, the two of them sitting on the sofa together in a ray of sunlight, braiding one another’s hair and humming. And Draco was sitting at the glass-topped breakfast table, feet up on a wicker chair, bare ankles crossed, reading tidbits to them from the _Daily Prophet_. He didn’t even look up.

“Good morning, Longbottom.”

Neville could feel his mouth move, but he didn’t quite manage to make any words.

“Some night last night, eh?” Draco went on, exactly as if Neville hadn’t shagged him into next week. "There’s kippers, and also crumpets if you want breakfast. I expect you might be hungry; I certainly was.” Finally Draco folded the paper and looked at him over its edge, his expression betraying nothing but his eyes dancing. “There’s been an interesting development.”

“Has there,” Neville finally managed.

Draco stood and brushed back his robes in the same movement, so that they flared out behind him before settling back down. _They must teach that in Slytherin House,_ Neville thought. “Mother,” he addressed Narcissa, who looked up at him and smiled. Her face hadn’t changed at all, not that Neville could see; she looked not a single day older, and for that matter perhaps younger, or more carefree. Neville could only imagine how living with Lucius would wear anyone down.

“Mother has something to show us,” said Draco, his voice suddenly very gentle, and knelt down next to her. He very carefully folded up the sleeve of her snowy-white dressing gown, revealing something on her right arm—a tattoo.

Neville couldn’t breathe. There on her white skin, the same colour as Draco’s, were the stars of the constellation giving him his name, but pricked out in perfect dots of bright blood-red ink. There was no swelling or discolouration of any kind. She smiled at Draco, laid one hand against his cheek for a moment, and then turned back to Alice, who had unwrapped a butterscotch humbug and was placing it soberly between Narcissa’s lips, as if it were sacred in some way.

He and Draco looked at each other; Draco’s smile was sharp, and he gave a shrug with one thin shoulder. There was nothing to say, but suddenly Neville wanted—he wanted—but his mother had stood up and was urgently trying to give him the sweets wrapper, face drawn up with concern. “Not now, Mum,” Neville said, and pressed it back into her hand. “I love you. I’ll be right back, okay? I’ve just got to—there’s something I have to—just _wait.”_

He half-dragged Draco around the corner, and turned to face him, thunderstruck; Draco promptly shoved him against the wall and kissed him, hard. They stood there for a long moment entangled, Draco’s thigh hot and urgent between his legs, Neville’s hands gripping his hips so hard he thought he’d leave bruises. Finally they broke for air, and Draco laughed.

“Her arm—you saw it, right? I wasn’t just imagining it?”

“No,” said Neville, thickly, and they found each other’s mouths again. Neville lowered his head and kissed Draco’s neck, the sweet spot where it met his shoulder, nosing his collar aside, and Draco made a whining sound, and shoved his thigh upward. It was getting indecent; a Mediwitch was going to come round the corner any second and throw them out—

“Gods, but you’re perfect,” said Draco, and this time Neville laughed.

“Hardly.”

“Is that so? Then what are your many faults, pray tell. You visit your mum in the hospital, you fuck me into the mattress, you’re a good kisser, you—”

“I never talk, for starters.”

“And given the rafts of idiocy spouted by most people, that’s hardly a drawback. Next.”

“I’m…divorced.”

“How fortunate for me, that I don’t have to seduce a married man,” said Draco. “Still not seeing the problem.”

“I’m poor?” He owned the building, with Luna, but they were always just getting by.

“It may have somehow escaped your notice, but so am I,” Draco said. “If I wanted to take vacations in the Côte d’Azur every winter I’d have married Blaise. But here we are.”

“Here we are,” echoed Neville, who tried not to get stuck on the word _married_ and instead focused on licking into Draco’s mouth until he made a strangled noise and finally shoved away from the wall, shaking his robes out around himself and looking distressed. Neville fought not to laugh.

“Trying to hide something, Malfoy?”

“Sod off,” said Draco, trying to sound irritated and failing.

“I have a better idea,” said Neville. “Let’s go have breakfast with our mothers, and then go home. And pick this up again there.”

Draco looked up at him through those pale eyelashes, grey eyes considering. “See, I said you were perfect.”

Hand in hand, they came back around the corner, Neville fighting a blush. But Alice wasn’t even looking at him; she had her chin on her folded arms at the breakfast table, utterly absorbed; Narcissa had been folding the sweets wrappers into little origami swans, and Alice had them all in a row, from greatest to least. Draco let go of his hand and unsleeved his wand.

“Mrs Longbottom? Pick one.”

Alice looked uncertain, and then, almost shyly, touched a red-and-green strawberry wrapper. The tip of Draco’s wand moved, but only barely, and the little swan rose aloft and slowly began winging its way around the room in loops, spiralling higher and higher, toward the ceiling. Narcissa laughed, and clapped her hands; and Neville got a peppermint wrapper going, and then a chocolate frog; until after a few more seconds, the room was filled with bright sunshine, the scent of oranges, and a small flock of serenely gliding paper birds. Neville watched Draco, the wand in his slender fingers, his face lifted, so like his mother’s, the two of them momentarily transfixed with wonder. And that was what magic could do, Neville thought; it couldn’t fix everything, or even the worst things; but it came when you least expected it, like Draco’s dark horse; and it brought a moment of color, and movement, and peace into your life, so that you had what you needed to go on and find for yourself the next part of whatever enchantment lay ahead.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> NB that the incantation is made of lines cut up and rearranged from [_Aradia, Gospel of the Witches_](https://www.sacred-texts.com/pag/aradia/index.htm), 1899.
> 
> There's sort of an epilogue, and here it is, straight from my DMs:
> 
> me: poor harry/ginny and ron/hermione  
me: in five years they’ll all divorce each other  
expatgirl: harry and ron don't so much not notice as they just don't care  
me: hermione and ginny will move in together and start an lgbtq+ bookshop  
me: and hermione gets a judith butler haircut and becomes an important lecturer  
expatgirl: but first she and ginny motorcycle across europe  
me: hermione falls in love all over again with ginny’s sharp little face and skinny wrists sticking out of her black leather jacket as they sample strange cheeses in small belgian farmtowns  
me: ...ye gods what do i even call this thing  
expatgirl: draco malfoy and the moderately priced birthday party of fate

**Author's Note:**

> Write a tattoo AU, said [ExpatGirl](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ExpatGirl/works)! It'll be fun, she said! In the end it was, but mostly thanks to her gorgeous headcanons and, in some cases, entire lines I just lifted and used wholesale. This fic wouldn't exist without her, nor, I suspect would I. Thanks also to my beloved fandom wife/best beta/BFF [Betts](https://archiveofourown.org/users/betts/works), who saves me and my prose again and again, on the daily. Finally, gratitude to [coldwaughtersq](https://archiveofourown.org/users/coldwaughtersq/works) for the eleventh-hour proofread and cheerleading. This fic is for [VLDarling](https://archiveofourown.org/users/VLDarling/works), because she gets me.
> 
> Now, with its own [Spotify playlist](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/2ao00VkTS1lVtFP4gOPjWS?si=O0sRuOFjRY-0RcdVKyIdnA) and a [conveniently rebloggable Tumblr post](https://aeriallon.tumblr.com/post/611890614110453760/aeriallon-dark-horse-by-aeriallon-harry). Go on, you know you want to.
> 
> [Important postscript: so last night I was reading aideomai's wonderful "[Trying](https://archiveofourown.org/works/14137785)" and realised to my horror that it has a St. Mungo's scene almost identical to the ending here—and I left kudos, which means I clearly read it, stuffed it into my subconscious, forgot all about it, and then reconstituted it proudly as my own. Ye gods, how embarrassing and terrible! All I can do now is say—go read their fic, it's much better anyway.]


End file.
